The Two Mirandas

Abstract

Although the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Miranda v. Arizona purported to set forth a clear, bright-line rule, numerous difficult subsidiary issues have developed in the past fifty years. These include: (1) what is custody?; (2) what is interrogation?; (3) when are the Miranda rights successfully waived?; (4) when are the Miranda rights successfully invoked?; (5) should the indirect fruits of unwarned interrogation, such as physical evidence and later warned statements, be admissible?; (6) should the products of unwarned interrogation be admissible for impeachment?; and (7) are there any exceptions to the Miranda rule? The Court’s decisions resolving these issues have often not been a model of clarity. Sometimes, a majority of the Court cannot even agree on a single rationale.Much of this confusion stems directly from a central ambiguity in the Miranda decision itself, for the Court in that case tried to do two things at once: prescribe concrete guidelines for police during custodial interrogation, and provide similarly clear benchmarks for courts in determining the admissibility of statements taken during those interrogations. Thus, there is a “police conduct model” of Miranda, by which Miranda requires the exclusion of unwarned statements, as with exclusion of evidence in the Fourth Amendment context, as the penalty for police failure to follow the rules of interrogation. But there is also an “admissibility model” of Miranda, by which exclusion of unwarned statements follows from treating those statements as presumptively compelled and therefore inadmissible under the Self-Incrimination Clause. In essence, then, there are really two Mirandas: Miranda as a prescription for police conduct and Miranda as regulator of the admissibility of statements. And these two readings are sometimes in serious tension with one another, leading to the muddled case law that exists on the seven subsidiary issues identified above. Until the Court definitively decides which Miranda is the “real” Miranda, the doctrine will continue to be riddled with confusion.