The Glade 4.0

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke Miranda protections during criminal interrogations, a decision one dissenting justice said turns defendants' rights "upside down."

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 in a 5-4 decision that 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, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich. He appealed his conviction, saying that he invoked his Miranda right to remain silent by remaining silent.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing the decision for the court's conservatives, said that wasn'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."

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."

Van Chester Thompkins was arrested for murder in 2001 and interrogated by police for three hours. At the beginning, Thompkins was read his Miranda rights and said he understood.

The officers in the room said Thompkins said little during the interrogation, occasionally answering "yes," "no," "I don't know," nodding his head and making eye contact as his responses. But when one of the officers asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for "shooting that boy down," Thompkins said, "Yes."

He was convicted, but on appeal he wanted that statement thrown out because he said he invoked his Miranda rights by being uncommunicative with the interrogating officers.

The Cincinnati-based appeals court agreed and threw out his confession and conviction. The high court reversed that decision.

The case is Berghuis v. Thompkins, 08-1470.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

This is a fart in a thunderstorm, and means absolutely nothing. You don't have to speak to remain silent. You can still just remain silent. The only difference is that the police can, if they want, keep asking you questions. You can keep right on not talking.

You never had an absolute right to silence anyhow because you never had the right to fail to identify yourself and your identity is not incriminating information. Neither is invoking your right to silence or asking for a lawyer. Both are Constitutionally protected and cannot be used against you in court so speaking to invoke them in no way alters anything.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Why is this a story? Police can question all they want, but the second you utter either of those phrases they have to stop. He didn't say anything, and the cops didn't do anything wrong.

Is it news that people are ignorant of their rights? Because it shouldn't be.

I doubt there are more than a handful of people in the US who haven't heard the Miranda rights read at some point in their lives, as common as those words are in the movies, on tv, etc.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Sounds more like a point of order than any kind of landmark ruling flying in the face of current practice.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I like this ruling, once you state that you're invoking your right to remain silent any continued questioning can and should be considered coercive and be thrown out on that basis.
Sort of kills the good cop bad cop routine.

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History of the Condom
In 1272, the Muslim Arabs invented the condom, using a goat's lower intestine.
In 1873, the British somewhat refined the idea, by taking the intestine out of the goat first.

double post

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History of the Condom
In 1272, the Muslim Arabs invented the condom, using a goat's lower intestine.
In 1873, the British somewhat refined the idea, by taking the intestine out of the goat first.

Your identity certainly could be incriminating in the sense that knowledge of prior arrests/criminal history will create bias against you.

That being said, from what I'm reading I honestly don't have a major issue with this, because it seems to be effectively what was already in place, contrary to Sotomayor's characterization.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

Yeah, newsflash: The first ruling I hear Sotomayor's opinion of confirms her as a useless and clueless judge.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Yeah, her opinion is not well founded and overly inflammatory.

This changes nothing, and quite frankly, just illustrates the stupidity of the plaintiff.

That's not incrimination. That's bias.



Indeed.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."