Supreme Court: Suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent

[The Straight Story]

Supreme Court: Suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke their Miranda protection during interrogation

http://twitter.com/BreakingNews

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court says suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke their Miranda protection during interrogations.

A 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 Tuesday 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.

The ruling comes in a case where a suspect remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a murder. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

http://tinyurl.com/26glpc6

[baldguy]

1. How? By breaking their scilence?

Is Kafka writing briefs for the USSC now?

[marmar]

2. This Supreme Court is just killing off the last vestiges of democracy.....

Now we don't even have the illusion of democracy anymore.

[Subdivisions]

4. Yep. We are steadily losing our rights in order to 'protect' us from evildoers. n/t

[Mist]

10. Continuing the trend from the 2001 selection. nt

[Bitwit1234]

17. I watch a lot of the TV and discovery shows

and most of the police encourage the perpetrator to agree that they are remaining silent. So this is something that has been going on for a while. If it was me, and I don't care if people thing it is controversial, I would definitely tell the police I agree and even sign a statement if need be.

[joeybee12]

3. Let me guess, a 5-4 decision...what scum....n/t

[DefenseLawyer]

5. Don't count on it.

The not-really-liberal "liberal" wing of the Court is as authoritarian as the right on these kinds of issues. Sometimes more so.

[The Straight Story]

6. according to msnbc it was 5-4 (nt)

[joeybee12]

8. Thanks...just saw that...n/t

[joeybee12]

7. Sotomayor might side with the Gang of 5 on this one...

can't find anything about it though.

[DefenseLawyer]

9. I stand corrected and pleasantly surprised

Looks straight down the line 5-4, Kennedy opinion, with Sotomayor writing a dissent. Still a disappointing decision but at least the right people were on the right side of it.

[joeybee12]

12. Yeah, she clearly pointed out how non-sensical this was...

...amazing...our only hope is one of these dies or retires...Thomas and Scalia would probably have to die to leave...they're so evil they want to keep being evil forever.

[Dappleganger]

13. Why surprised?

Justice Sotomayor has been making decisions which are consistently liberal so far.

[DefenseLawyer]

15. Surprised because Sotomayor, the former prosecutor

has a long record of being very very very pro-prosecution in criminal cases. Breyer has never been a reliable vote either, much less reliable than Stevens or Souter. So I am pleasantly surprised.

[mrcheerful]

11. I realize that this decision is bad but in the real world cops have gotten around the

Miranda laws in some states by calling an interrogation an interview so the suspects were never read their Miranda rights as they were not being charged with a crime at the time of the interview, that came after they talked to cops. In Michigan Miranda rights weren't read until the suspect got into court and the judge read them their Miranda rights. There are people sitting in jails and prison because they thought that they weren't being investigated for a crime, they thought they were just being asked about a crime they might have witnessed.

[charlesg]

14. Sotomayor: Decision "turns Miranda upside down"

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court's newest member, wrote a strongly worded dissent for the court's liberals, saying the majority's decision "turns Miranda upside down." "Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counterintuitively, 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."

[mrcheerful]

16. How is this any different then allowing cops to trick people into giving up their right to remain

silent every day? People are mislead into believing that if they come clean with police that somehow that will work in their favor in court and are shocked every day to learn that the cops will only go to court and say that the suspect gave them the information freely. Every episode of the TV show COPS has the police telling people that if they had told them there was a joint in the car at most they would have gotten a ticket then sent home. That is a lie and it is misleading as with zero tolerance law's only a few states have the ticket law, most states 1 joint can an will end up with the person sitting in jail unless the cop just decides he doesn't want to fill out the papers.