-Caveat Lector-
``If police can violate Miranda with impunity, where's the check on
police power?"
Court To Revisit Its Miranda Ruling
By RICHARD CARELLI
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court, confronting its landmark Miranda ruling
head-on, agreed Monday to decide whether police still must warn criminal
suspects they have a ``right to remain silent'' and to get a lawyer's help.
The justices said they will rule by summer on whether Congress in 1968
effectively overturned the 1966 decision, familiar not only to police and
suspects but to generations of Americans who have witnessed countless arrests
in movies and on television.
Clinton administration lawyers are refusing to defend the anti-Miranda law
enacted by Congress, but a federal appeals court upheld it earlier this year
- setting the stage for this constitutional showdown.
The court, far more liberal 33 years ago than it is today, sought to remedy
``inherently coercive'' interrogations by requiring police to inform criminal
suspects of their rights before questioning them. Failure to give the
warnings can result in evidence - a confession or some incriminating
statement - being lost to prosecutors.
But in a surprising ruling earlier this year, the conservative 4th U.S.
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a long-ignored 1968 federal law known as
Section 3501 means failure to issue Miranda warnings no longer requires
automatic exclusion of evidence in federal prosecutions.
That ruling would let prosecutors use incriminating statements that Charles
Dickerson of Takoma Park, Md. - accused in seven bank robberies in Maryland
and Virginia - made to FBI agents even though he may not have received a
proper Miranda warning.
The appeals court's rationale would apply to state prosecutions as well. By
an 8-5 vote last February, it said Section 3501 made failing to give Miranda
warnings just one of several factors in deciding whether statements to police
were made voluntarily.
Section 3501 says ``the presence or absence'' of any factor such as a Miranda
warning ``need not be conclusive on the issue of voluntariness.''
Neither Dickerson nor the federal prosecutors who had opposed his appeal
focused on the 1968 law. But University of Utah law professor Paul Cassell,
representing the conservative Washington Legal Foundation as a friend of the
court, sought to revive the dormant Section 3501.
He succeeded in the 4th Circuit court and was appointed Monday to defend the
law when the case is argued before the nation's highest court in March or
April.
``We're cautiously optimistic about our chances of winning,'' Cassell said
after learning of the court's action. ``This is an issue that has been
waiting to be decided for over 30 years. The court today is much more
sensitive to the need for confessions, which are vital to solving large
numbers of criminal cases,'' he said.
The Miranda decision, named for the late Ernesto Miranda, a career criminal
in Phoenix, flowed from the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that no one ``shall
be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.''
But the court never explicitly has said its decision or the police warnings
were required by the Fifth Amendment. If the Miranda ruling was not
constitutionally based, the court never really had the authority to make the
warnings mandatory.
After Dickerson's appeal was filed, the Clinton administration refused to
defend Section 3501. Justice Department lawyers contend that the Miranda
ruling ``is of constitutional dimension'' and ``cannot be superseded merely
by legislation.''
``At this point in time, 33 years after Miranda was decided and many years
after it has been absorbed into police practices, judicial procedures and
public understanding, the Miranda decision should not be overruled,''
government lawyers told the court.
The political sensitivity of the case was highlighted when Attorney General
Janet Reno decided to sign the government's brief herself, a rarity.
Dickerson's lawyer, James Hundley of Fairfax, Va., was not immediately
available for comment Monday. But in a recent interview, he worried about his
client, now free on bail, and the nation at large.
``Sure we run the risk of having the whole country stuck with a bad Supreme
Court decision, but I have to represent my client zealously,'' Hundley said.
``If police can violate Miranda with impunity, where's the check on police
power/"
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