Miranda warning | Definition, Text, Rights, Amendment, & Supreme Court (2024)

Miranda warning, tenet of United States criminal procedure that protects an individual’s rights during an arrest. When a suspect is taken into custody and interrogated, members of law enforcement are legally bound to apprise the suspect of several rights that are underpinned by the U.S. Constitution. As outlined in the U.S. Supreme Court decision Miranda v. Arizona (1966), suspects must be informed that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say can be used as evidence, that they have the right to speak with an attorney before and while speaking to law enforcement, and that an attorney will be provided if a suspect cannot afford one. The actual text of the Miranda warning delivered by law enforcement officers may vary between jurisdictions, but, as long as these rights are specified, slight differences in language are permitted. An additional point often included in the Miranda warning is that the suspect may opt to conclude the interrogation at any time, even after initially agreeing to talk.

Purpose and basis

The Miranda warning serves as a safeguard to limit the scope of police interrogation. It tries to prevent false confessions and those generated under duress borne of, for example, extremely lengthy interrogations. The act of proffering this speech has come to be known as “Mirandizing” the suspect. Suspects may opt to waive their Miranda rights and choose to speak with law enforcement (with or without legal counsel present) at any point, and most suspects do.

The Miranda rights and warning derive their basis from the Fifth and Sixth Amendments. The Fifth Amendment protects the right of a suspect to remain silent instead of saying something self-incriminating that could later be used as damaging evidence at trial. The Sixth Amendment protects the right to have legal counsel present before and during an interrogation by law enforcement. Consulting an attorney, who is generally more aware of the facets of law than a layperson, may inform a suspect’s approach to a conversation with law enforcement officials and may affect how or if certain questions are answered.

Miranda v. Arizona

Miranda v. Arizona (1966)—the court case from which the rights and warning take their name—was the first in a group of four consolidated cases addressed by the Supreme Court that all concerned individuals being interrogated for a length of time without being informed of their rights. The Court ruled that Ernesto Miranda’s confession to kidnapping and rape should have been inadmissible as evidence at trial because he was not informed of his right to decline to speak with law enforcement in order to avoid incriminating himself or that he could demand legal counsel during his two-hour interrogation. His confession was presented as evidence against him at court, and he was convicted. The Supreme Court overturned this decision. (Miranda was later retried, and he was again convicted, without the use of his confession as evidence.) The defendants in two of the other cases, Westover v. United States and Vignera v. New York, also had their convictions overturned by the Supreme Court. The fourth case, California v. Stewart, had already been overturned by the Supreme Court of California for similar reasons, and that decision was affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The decisions in Miranda v. Arizona were partially informed by a precedent established in Escobedo v. Illinois (1964). In that case the defendant, Danny Escobedo, was arrested and interrogated for hours at a police station, and his multiple requests to speak with a lawyer went unheeded. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction, citing a violation of Escobedo’s rights and stressing the importance of the ability of suspects to avail themselves of legal counsel during the period immediately following their arrest. In its opinion, the Court pinpointed the moment when a suspect changes from a person of interest to a specific target of an investigation and the moment that the interrogation begins to solicit evidence or a confession from that suspect as the time that a suspect is entitled to consult a lawyer.

Criticism and legal challenges

Some critics of the Miranda warning argue that it is hard for some suspects to comprehend and that it is not always feasible for suspects to invoke it while detained. Police officers are required to say the Miranda warning, but they’re not required to explain it. The eponymous court case and the practice have faced legal challenges in the years since it was enacted. Most notably, in 2000, in Dickerson v. United States, the Supreme Court considered whether Congress could overrule Miranda; the Court upheld it as a constitutional rule and called it “part of our national culture.”

In 2022 in Vega v. Tekoh, the Supreme Court found that the failure to advise a suspect of the Miranda rights does not offer grounds for a civil suit against the arresting officer and that allowing such a suit to proceed would be a disservice to “judicial economy” and “present many procedural issues.” The Court ruled that Miranda rights are in place to protect individuals at their subsequent trials and that to not administer a Miranda warning does not amount to a violation of a suspect’s constitutional rights.