Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan Votes Against Miranda Protections

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Source: Salon.com

Glenn Greenwald


The Supreme Court today reversed the Sixth Circuit’s grant of habeas corpus. All nine of the justices agreed that the legal conclusion of the Sixth Circuit — that “isolation from the general prison population, combined with questioning about conduct occurring outside the prison, makes any such interrogation custodial per se” – was not “clearly established Federal law” (a prerequisite to granting habeas corpus relief for a state prisoner). But on the question of whether the prisoner was entitled to be read his Miranda rights under the circumstances here — i.e., he did not consent to being removed from his cell for interrogation and was “questioned by two armed deputies long into the night and early morning,” often with the door closed — the Supreme Court split by a 6-3 vote. Six justices (the 5 right-wing justices plus Kagan) signed onto Justice Alito’s opinion ruling that the prisoner was not in “custody for purposes of Miranda,” while the 3 relative liberals on the Court (Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Breyer) all joined Justice Ginsburg’s dissenting opinion, which concluded (citations omitted):

As the Court acknowledges, Fields did not invite or consent to the interview. He was removed from his cell in the evening, taken to a conference room in the sheriff ’s quarters, and questioned by two armed deputies long into the night and early morning. He was not told at the outset that he had the right to decline to speak with the deputies. Shut in with the armed officers, Fields felt “trapped.” Although told he could return to his cell if he did not want to cooperate, Fields believed the deputies “would not have allowed [him] to leave the room.” And with good reason. More than once, “he told the officers . . . he did not want to speak with them anymore” . . . .

Was Fields “held for interrogation”? See Miranda, 384 U. S., at 471. Brought to, and left alone with, the gun-bearing deputies, he surely was in my judgment. . . . For the reasons stated, I would hold that the “incommunicado interrogation [of Fields] in a police-dominated atmosphere,” without informing him of his rights, dishonored the Fifth Amendment privilege Miranda was designed to safeguard.

I don’t want to overstate the importance of this ruling: it’s not the most significant Supreme Court decision ever and it’s not dispositive on the question of whether Kagan will turn out to be a good replacement for Stevens; that still remains to be seen. But it’s also far from unimportant. As the lawyer Bmaz at Marcy Wheeler’s blog observes today, “the decision is a significant further erosion of the critical Constitutional protections embodied in Miranda.” That’s because it “specifically holds that police are not automatically required to tell prisoners of their legal right to remain silent and have an attorney present when being questioned in prison about another crime.”