Supreme Court says suspects must speak up to invoke right to remain silent
12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, June 2, 2010
FROM WIRE REPORTS The Washington Post,
WASHINGTON – In a narrowly split ruling, the Supreme Court said Tuesday that criminal suspects seeking to protect their right to remain silent must speak up to invoke it, a decision that dissenting liberal justices said turns the protections of a Miranda warning "upside down."
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, did not disturb Miranda's requirement that suspects be told they have the right to remain silent. But he said courts need not suppress statements made by defendants who received such warnings, did not expressly waive their rights and spoke only after remaining silent through hours of interrogation.
Elena Kagan, nominated to join the court, sided with police as U.S. solicitor general when the case came before the court.
A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are at the top of the warnings that police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But Tuesday's majority declared that in order to stop an interrogation, suspects must break their silence and tell police they are going to remain quiet.
The 5-4 decision means that police can keep shooting questions at a suspect who refuses to talk as long as they want in hopes that the person will crack and give them some information, said Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor.
"It's a little bit less restraint that the officers have to show," Friedman said.
Michigan case
The ruling came in the case of Van Chester Thompkins, a Michigan man accused of a slaying outside a mall in 2000. Arrested a year later, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights but refused to sign a form acknowledging that he understood them.
Thompkins then remained almost entirely silent during three hours of interrogation. Detectives finally asked him: "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?" He answered, "Yes."
The statement was used against him, and he was convicted of murder.
The federal appeals court in Cincinnati ruled in 2008 that Thompkins' silence throughout most of the interrogation "offered a clear and unequivocal message to the officers: Thompkins did not wish to waive his rights."
But Kennedy, writing the decision for the high court's conservatives, said that simply being silent isn't enough.
"Thompkins did not say that he wanted to remain silent or that he did not want to talk to police," Kennedy said. "Had he made either of these simple, unambiguous statements, he would have invoked his right to cut off questioning. Here he did neither, so he did not invoke his right to remain silent." He was joined in the opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito , Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Prosecutors cheered the decision, saying it takes the guesswork out of when police have to stop questioning suspects. "Is it too much to ask for a criminal suspect to say he doesn't want to talk to police?" said Scott Burns of the National District Attorneys Association.
Sotomayor's dissent
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in the sharpest dissent of her young career on the court, accused the majority of casting aside judicial restraint and creating a rule that is "a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination" that Miranda established more than 40 years ago.
"Today's decision turns Miranda upside down," Sotomayor wrote. "Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent, which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak."
She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer , Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens.
Supreme Court nominee Kagan had told the Supreme Court: "An unambiguous-invocation requirement for the right to remain silent and terminate questioning strikes the appropriate balance between protecting the suspect's rights and permitting valuable police investigation."
