OK, All Together Now: 'You Have the Right to . . .'

NEW HAVEN, CONN. — I have a confession to make: I've been Mirandized more times than I can remember. Well, sort of. I've never actually been arrested or hauled down to a police station. But like virtually everyone else in America, I've been treated to the Miranda warning countless times on television. Its words are now burned into my brain as indelibly as the lyrics of "Hey, Jude" or "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case, Dickerson vs. United States, that could result in the formal overruling of Miranda. Civil libertarians quickly began sounding alarm bells, while some of Miranda's fiercest critics started popping champaign corks. More than three decades after it was decided, Miranda still gets people excited.

But all the noise last week misses the point. For better or worse, Miranda has been woven into the fabric of daily life: into the standard operating procedures of police departments around the country; into the expectations of most judges and prosecutors (to say nothing of defense lawyers); and, most important, into the cultural literacy and mind-set of virtually every American, rich or poor, black or white. Overruling Miranda cannot take us back to the world that preexisted Miranda, even if we wanted to go there. We have all been Mirandized too many times--if only on television.

Before the Supreme Court decided Miranda vs. Arizona in 1966, well-settled law held that a police-station confession was admissible against a criminal defendant only if he had given the statement "voluntarily." No single factor marked the line between inadmissible coerced statements and admissible voluntary ones. Instead, judges considered each case on its own and pondered all the details: the length of the interrogation; the background, age and intelligence of the suspect; the harshness of the conditions of police-station confinement (was the suspect offered coffee and sandwiches?); and so on.

Miranda dramatically changed this legal landscape. By a 5-4 vote, the Warren court held that unless cops allowed defense lawyers into police-station interrogations, and unless cops further warned suspects of their rights to keep silent and have lawyers present, then the confessions would be categorically inadmissible.