Miranda v. Arizona

Instead the slim majority, led by Justice Anthony Kennedy said that criminal suspects must speak up and tell interrogators that they want to remain silent before their Miranda rights are invoked. Writing for The Root, University of Maryland law school professor Sherrilyn Ifill maintained that "police officers may now interrogate detainees for hours on end - no limit is suggested by the court - and so long as the detainee does not use the magic words that expressly indicates a refusal to answer questions or the desire for an attorney, any words uttered - no matter how few - may be used against him."

During a recent ACS panel discussion, constitutional law experts discussed Miranda's future in light of the recent court rulings, such as Berghuis, and the administration's announcement that it would seek a broad exception to the Miranda rule, established in the 1966 landmark ruling in Miranda v. Arizona.

Constitutional law expert and Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole noted that a "public safety exception" has already been created by the Supreme Court and that further carving out exceptions to the Miranda rule for waging war against terrorism, a nebulous term, would only further weaken constitutional rights for citizens and noncitizens. And broadening an exception to the Miranda rule, Cole added, would likely be unconstitutional.

It is not clear why Congress should be speaking to this matter, Cole (pictured) said. Miranda, he continued, is a judge-made rule driven by constitutional concerns. And the last time Congress "waded into" the realm by trying to re-write Miranda, the high court invalidated the action.

The panel also included Michael German, policy counsel for the ACLU and a former FBI special agent, and Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow and research director at Brookings. Video of the panel discussion, "Miranda's Future," is below.

Denniston continued, "the Court for the first time made two things clear about Miranda rights: first, if a suspect does not want to talk to police - that is, to invoke a right to silence - he must say so, with a clear statement because it is not enough to sit silently or to remain uncooperative, even through a long session; and second, if the suspect finally answers a suggestive question with a one-word response that amounts to a confession, that, by itself, will be understood as a waiver of the right to silence and the statement can be used as evidence. Police need not obtain an explicit waiver of that right. The net practical effect is likely to be that police, in the face of a suspect's continued silence after being given Miranda warnings, can continue to question him, even for a couple of hours, in hopes eventually of getting him to confess."

The decision in Berghuis v. Thompkins arose from a Michigan case where the suspect Van Chester Thompkins remained mostly silent through a lengthy police interrogation before implicating himself in a murder. He appealed his case arguing that his statements should not have been admissible because he had invoked his right to remain silent, by largely doing so, The Associated Press reported.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy concluded that Thompkins did not properly raise his Miranda rights. "Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police. Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his ‘right to cut off questioning.' Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor lodged a dissent blasting the majority for what she described as an inconsistent reading of precedent.

"Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent - which counterintuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded."

For more information on all of the Court's decisions see SCOTUSblog here.

The high court also added a case to its forthcoming term. In Mayo Foundation v. United States, the Court will consider whether medical residents are students or employees for purposes of collecting Social Security taxes, The AP reports.