The U.S. Supreme has issued a flurry of momentous decisions this term, but one ruling risks slipping through the media cracks, and it is an important one for the nation’s police.
Every TV viewer is familiar with fictional crooks being read their Miranda rights on their favorite cop show.
“You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can be held against you in a court of law,” are words we’ve grown up hearing on TV.
But these rights are not just fodder for TV serials.
Reading suspects the Miranda warning has been a requirement for policemen since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that suspects had to be informed of their rights to keep them from incriminating themselves after being arrested.
Trending:
Nothing has changed about that, but on Thursday, the nation’s highest court issued a 6-3 ruling that in part ruled that suspects cannot sue the police if they were not read their Miranda Rights, Detroit’s WXYZ reported.
In Thursday’s Vega v. Tekoh ruling, the court sided with a sheriff’s deputy at the center of a lawsuit filed by a Los Angeles hospital worker who sued saying that he had not been read his rights when he was arrested.
Leading the majority, Justice Samuel Alito stated in his opinion that “a violation of Miranda is not itself a violation of the Fifth Amendment,” and added “we see no justification for expanding Miranda to confer a right to sue” under Section 1983.
“Miranda did not hold that a violation of the rules it established necessarily constitute a Fifth Amendment violation, and it is difficult to see how it could have held otherwise,” Alito wrote.
Did the court make the right decision in this case?
Yes: 0% (0 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
<![CDATA[ function ffp_getCookie(cname) { var name = cname + “=”; var decodedCookie = decodeURIComponent(document.cookie); var ca = decodedCookie.split(‘;’); for(var i = 0; i
“For one thing, it is easy to imagine many situations in which an un-Mirandized suspect in custody may make self-incriminating statements without any hint of compulsion.”
“In addition,” Alito added, “the warnings that the Court required included components, such as notification of the right to have retained or appointed counsel present…