Today (June 1), the Supreme Court ruled with controversial decision regarding the rights of alleged law breakers.
According to the new ruling, suspects must explicitly tell police that they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations. The right to “remain silent and a right to a lawyer” are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations.
But the justices said in a 5-4 decision that suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.
“Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent – which counter intuitively, requires them to speak,” she said. “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.”
The ruling came after the Supreme Court was presented the case of Van Chester Thompkins. In the case, Thompkins, who was arrested in 2001, remained mostly silent during a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000 murder.
He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent. The police however stated that Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and stated that he understood.
“Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police,” Kennedy said. “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.”
The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering “yes,” “no,” “I don’t know,” nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for “shooting that boy down,” Thompkins said, “Yes.”
He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.
The Cincinnati-based appeals court agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.
