Miranda v Arizona
“This Court has undertaken to review the voluntariness of statements obtained by police in state cases since Brown v. Mississippi, 297 U. S. 278 (1936). (Davis v. North Carolina, 384 U.S. 737 (1966)) The Warren Court from 1953 until 1969 established luminary rights with its liberal interpretation, and as some say “ judicial policy making”, such as the “right to privacy” Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479(1965), “separate but equal is not constitutional” Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) and the definitive protection of rights in the Miranda decision. Miranda v. Arizona was one of a series of landmark Supreme Court cases of the mid-1960 's establishing new guarantees of procedural fairness for defendants in criminal cases. The Court 's decision in Miranda sprang from two different lines of precedents under the Fourteenth Amendment. One of these lines was the right-to-counsel cases: Powell v. Alabama (1932), in which the Court held that indigent defendants had to be afforded counsel in capital cases; Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), which extended the right to counsel for indigent defendants to all felony cases; and Escobedo v. Illinois (1964), in which the Court held that a confession obtained from a defendant who had asked for and been denied permission to speak to an attorney was inadmissible. By 1964, the right to counsel had expanded to include mandatory representation for indigents at trial in all felonies and also gave potential defendants the right to representation during questioning while in custody if they requested it. The second line of cases culminated with Malloy v. Hogan (1964), in which the Court had held that the privilege against self-incrimination applied to the states. Moreover, prior to the Miranda case, a long series of Supreme Court decisions had established that neither physical coercion nor certain forms of psychological coercion could be used by police to obtain confessions from
Cited: Baker, L. (1983). Miranda: Crime, law and politics. Miranda: Crime, law and politics. New York: Anthenum, 1983. Cassell, P. G. The Miranda Debate, Law Justice and Policy. Boston : Northeastern University Press, 1996. Lasser, W. The limits of judicial power the Supreme Court in American Politics. Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 1988.