Law, order, and the rights of criminal defendants 137The Fifth Amendment
Miranda Rights and Self-Incrimination The familiar phrase “I plead the Fifth”
has been part of our criminal justice system since the Bill of Rights was ratified,
ensuring that a suspect cannot be compelled to provide court testimony that would
cause him or her to be prosecuted for a crime. However, what about outside a court
of law? If a police officer coerces a confession out of a suspect, does that amount to
self-incrimination?
Coercive police interrogations were allowed until a landmark case in 1966. Ernesto
Miranda had been convicted in an Arizona court of kidnapping and rape, on the basis
of a confession extracted after two hours of questioning in which he was not read his
rights. The Court overturned the conviction, saying that a police interrogation “is
inherently intimidating” and in these circumstances “no statement obtained from the
defendant can truly be the product of his free choice.”^132 To ensure that a confession is
truly a free choice, the Court came up with the well-known Miranda rights. If police do
not read a suspect these rights, nothing the suspect says can be used in court.Miranda rights
The list of civil liberties described in
the Fifth Amendment that must be
read to a suspect before anything the
suspect says can be used in a trial.The Court has carved out exceptions to the Miranda rights requirement because
the public has viewed the practice as “coddling criminals” and letting too many people
go free on legal technicalities. In one case, police failed to read a suspect his Miranda
rights until after they had frisked him, found an empty holster, and asked him where
his gun was. The suspect led police to a gun. The lower court dismissed the charges
because the gun had been used as incriminating evidence in the trial, but the Supreme
Court reinstated the conviction because “concern for public safety must be paramount
to adherence to the literal language of the Miranda r u le.”^133
Although the Court has been willing to carve out limited exceptions to the
Miranda rule, in 2000 the Court rejected Congress’s attempt to overturn Miranda by
designating all voluntary confessions as legally admissible evidence. The Court ruled
that it, and not Congress, has the power to determine constitutional protections for
criminal defendants. The justices also affirmed their intent to protect the Miranda rule,
saying: “Miranda has become embedded in routine police practice to the point where
the warnings have become part of our national culture.”13 4This is a typical example of the
Miranda warning card that police
officers carry with them and read to
every suspect after an arrest.Full_05_APT_64431_ch04_102-147.indd 137 16/11/18 1:31 PM