Where do Miranda rights originate?
Question: Where do Miranda rights originate?
Answer: The Miranda rights, the U.S. Constitutional basis for them are in the Fifth Amendment and the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Fifth Amendment dealing with a person’s right against self-incrimination, which applies not only when they’re on the witness stand in court but in any context. Citizens have the right not to speak to the police and say things that might incriminate themselves. And also the Sixth Amendment right to have counsel when they are under arrest, when they are suspected of a crime; the Sixth Amendment right to have protection of counsel. So that’s essentially where the Miranda Warnings and the Miranda rights originate. But the concept of the Miranda Warning specifically really took root in the 1966 U.S. Supreme Court case of Miranda v. Arizona, in which the U.S. Supreme Court basically said that for those rights to be meaningful, a suspect has to be aware of them.
If you don’t know your rights, if they’re not explained to you, if you’ve never been informed of them before, then the rights really don’t have much meaning or provide you, afford you much protection. So with the 1966 Supreme Court ruling, the Court said that when police arrest a suspect for a crime, before they can interrogate that person, they have to essentially read the rights, they have to make sure that the suspect understands those rights, and that suspect has to waive those rights and agree to talk to the police in spite of them. Otherwise, if the police don’t go through that process then any incriminating statement that they obtain would be inadmissible in court.
