
{"id":19126,"date":"2011-06-23T09:36:27","date_gmt":"2011-06-23T13:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.carrborocitizen.com\/main\/?p=19126"},"modified":"2011-06-23T09:53:27","modified_gmt":"2011-06-23T13:53:27","slug":"miranda-rule-revised","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/2011\/06\/23\/miranda-rule-revised\/","title":{"rendered":"Miranda rule revised"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By Taylor Sisk<br \/>\n<\/strong><em>Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In a decision on a case it heard in March involving a Chapel Hill middle-schooler, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that age should be a factor in determining if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s necessary to read suspects their Miranda rights.<\/p>\n<p>In her 5-4 majority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that it is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153beyond dispute that children will often feel bound to submit to police questioning when an adult in the same circumstances would feel free to leave,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and that police or the courts shouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t \u00e2\u20ac\u0153blind themselves to that commonsense reality.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>The case, J.D.B. v. North Carolina, began Sept. 29, 2005 at Smith Middle School in Chapel Hill, when a seventh-grade special-education student, identified today only as J.D.B., was taken out of his social studies class and interrogated in a conference room by a Chapel Hill Police investigator concerning some residential break-ins. Three other adults, including the school resource officer and assistant principal, were present. The door was closed but not locked.<\/p>\n<p>J.D.B. confessed to a break-in, but did so without having been read his Miranda rights (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You have the right to remain silent \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6\u00e2\u20ac\u009d). The authorities argued that J.D.B. was free to leave at any time, and that they thus weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t required to read him his rights.<\/p>\n<p>J.D.B.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attorney countered that the youth couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t reasonably have been expected to think he could walk away from two uniformed police officers and two school officials. The courts, including the state Supreme Court, disagreed, ruling that he had confessed voluntarily.<\/p>\n<p>The Supreme Court didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t rule on Thursday whether J.D.B. was in custody, sending the case back to the state courts to address that question, this time taking into account J. D. B.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s age at the time.<\/p>\n<p>Sotomayor argued that the court has in the past upheld that being in custody is an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153objective inquiry\u00e2\u20ac\u009d determined by whether a reasonable person would have felt at liberty to leave.<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153The benefit of the objective custody analysis is that it is \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcdesigned to give clear guidance to the police,\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sotomayor wrote, quoting a previous ruling.<\/p>\n<p>The objective inquiry frees police from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153anticipating the idiosyncrasies of every individual suspect and divining how those particular traits affect each person\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s subjective state of mind.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>But, she continued, a child subjected to questioning will sometimes feel pressured to talk when an adult would decline. <\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We think it clear that courts can account for that reality without doing any damage to the objective nature of the custody analysis,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Sotomayor wrote.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Someone they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t<\/strong><br \/>\nAccording to the law, custodial interrogation is questioning by law-enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom of action in any significant way.<\/p>\n<p>If a reasonable person feels he is free to go, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not in custody, and needn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be read his rights. <\/p>\n<p>In presenting J.D.B.\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case before the court in March, Assistant Appellate Defender Barbara Blackman argued that there are cognitive differences between children and adults, and that in failing to consider age when deciding whether to read the Miranda warning \u00e2\u20ac\u0153we are requiring these children to be someone that they never could be, and that is reasonable adults.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, Sotomayor concluded that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153officers and judges need no imaginative powers \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 or expertise in social and cultural anthropology to account for a child\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s age. They simply need the common sense to know that a 7-year-old is not a 13-year-old and neither is an adult.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>In his dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153If Miranda\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rigid, one-size-fits-all standards fail to account for the unique needs of juveniles, the response should be to rigorously apply the constitutional rule against coercion to ensure that the rights of minors are protected. There is no need to run Miranda off the rails.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>State Attorney General Roy Cooper, who argued the state\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s case before the Supreme Court, issued a brief statement: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Law enforcement needed a definite answer on whether they must consider age for Miranda purposes and now we know they do.\u00c2\u00a0Officers need clear standards when questioning witnesses and it will be important for future Courts to keep this ruling narrow.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>\u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is a great victory in that the Supreme Court recognized that as far as Miranda warnings go, juveniles are different. Our criminal justice system has always recognized that, and has treated them differently,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Mark Dorosin of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, who filed a brief in support of J.D.B. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This ruling reaffirms that understanding.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n<p>Sotomayor was joined in her opinion by Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Anthony Kennedy. Alito was joined by Justices John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a decision on a case it heard in March involving a Chapel Hill middle-schooler, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last Thursday that age should be a factor in determining if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s necessary to read suspects their Miranda rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19126"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19263,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19126\/revisions\/19263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibiblio.org\/carrborocitizen\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}