The New Miranda Warning

I never thought the Miranda warning was all that useful.  In fact, it actually raises more questions than it answers.  For example, the warning tells a suspect that anything he says can be used against him in court.  But asking for an attorney is saying something, isn’t it?  Could the prosecutor later use such a request against him?  (After all, television teaches us that only guilty people “lawyer-up.”)  And what if the suspect wants to remain silent?  Could his silence be used against him in court?  The Miranda warning fails to answer these and many other questions.

 Making matters even worse for the would-be defendant is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 130 S. Ct. 2250 (2010).  In a confidence inspiring 5-4 split, the Court ruled that a suspect cannot actually exercise the right to remain silent by remaining silent—even if that silence lasts through nearly three hours of interrogation.

 In response to all of this chaos, I’ve drafted a new and improved Miranda warning.

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Deterring Constitutional Violations

Consider a case of police misconduct:  An officer wants to enter and search a citizen’s home, but has no search warrant, no legal basis to obtain one, and no exigent circumstances to justify entry.  The officer enters and searches anyway and, as he suspects, finds contraband.  The citizen-turned-criminal-defendant then moves the court for a remedy: suppression of the evidence.

Should the evidence be suppressed?  In Herring v. United States, our Supreme Court held that suppression is not an individual right, but rather a last resort.  That is, even given a clear constitutional violation, a trial court should suppress evidence only in the rare case of egregious police misconduct, where suppression would deter the misconduct in the future.

Deterrence in this context, however, is an illusion.

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The Beginning of the End for Life Without Parole?

That question is the title of a new paper I’ve just uploaded to SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This essay introduces a new issue of the Federal Sentencing Reporter that is devoted to different aspects of the sentence of life without parole. An important question raised by many of the articles is whether LWOP, after two decades of explosive growth, is entering a period of decline. For instance, the Supreme Court declared LWOP unconstitutional for most juvenile offenders in May 2010, possibly inaugurating an era of more meaningful constitutional limitations on very long sentences. Additionally, many cash-strapped states have been developing new early-release programs in order to reduce corrections budgets, some of which hold out hope even for LWOP inmates. This essay considers the likelihood that these and other recent developments will contribute to a decline in LWOP. In the end, none of the developments portend dramatic changes, at least regarding LWOP for adult offenders, although it is possible that LWOP will undergo a period of slow, long-term decline, much as has occurred with the death penalty. After laying out this perspective, the essay then considers whether the United States ought to welcome such a period of decline.

Continue ReadingThe Beginning of the End for Life Without Parole?