Missouri v. Seibert (2004) is the telling example in the jurisdiction where the Miranda warnings were undermined. During the trial case, justices accepted the guilt of the suspect, but the question was whether all procedures were conducted within strict court rules and principles. During the investigation, it was detected that officers conducting the interrogation resorted to the “question-first, Mirandize-latter” approach in order to obtain the full confession on the convict’s behalf. The interrogators managed to get it, but they violated the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution, which state that every inmate has the right to be silent, use lawyer assistance and counseling, and not to be coerced to confess. The Miranda warnings imply the convict’s choice to accept their guilt or not. The major justices could not reach the typical decision during the process and wrote for the plurality of opinions and dissent.
Justice David Souter
David Souter decided to resort to the plurality of opinions and justices and question the Miranda warnings’ effectiveness that was not given a suspect during the initial integration. As the suspect could apply for the Miranda rights after the first confession, the crucial court aim was to question whether the Miranda warnings were used for counselling the suspect (Patrice Seibert) concerning her rights during the custodial process. It was unclear whether Seibert had any chances to keep silent or had any choices presenting an admissible confession or statement at that moment. Souter wondered if Seibert were coerced to bear testimony against herself.
A plurality of opinions happens when justices cannot come to the common solution in resolving an issue. The significant merit of the plurality opinion option is that it could hand in a prosecutor guidance and discern the vague picture on when exactly an intermediate warning had to be supposed to be effective. Obviously, it was necessary to observe when these warnings were given so as not to misguide and confuse a criminal concerning their rights in the frame of the fourth and fifth amendments of the US Constitution (Rubin, 2021). In case the Miranda Warnings are given in the middle of continuous and coordinated interrogations, the warnings are considered to be infective, and the confession can be invalidated. Courts have to evaluate and assess the interrogation specialties of an investigation (answers and questions) and completeness of the initial interrogation round. Souter claimed to detect the setting and timing of both sessions, the recurrence of the first and the second suspect’s statements, the degree, and the rate of the prosecutor’s questions during the second interrogation session. Souter asked whether the second round was as continuous as the initial round.
Justice Anthony Kennedy
Anthony Kennedy (one of the significant justices) concurred to write for the plurality of justices and offered to implement a test as well as Justice Breyer did. He claimed that it was necessary to undergo a more elaborate testimony suitable in this uncommon trial case, where both round interrogations were conducted. In case a two-step round testimony was carried in an inadmissible way, the final confession would be treated impermissible till the police officers conducting the investigation procedures fixed the current issue. They were to develop approaches and measures that would make the criminal differentiate the first session from the second one by evaluating new turning points of the trial case. Kennedy proposed that a break period between interrogations (20 minutes) could be considered as sufficient. Due to those Kennedy’s proposals, the suspect had chances that the first statement would be dubbed as inadmissible.
In other words, Justice Kennedy shared the opinion that the inmate’s initial confession could be treated as inadmissible. Kennedy offered his own opinion saying that it was essential to integrate a specified test and labeled it as “bad faith test (Kirshenbaum et al., 2021)”. This test aimed at the detection of officers’ bad faith while questioning Seibert. Kennedy wondered to detect whether officers decided not to tell the criminal about her right thus undermining the Miranda warnings frame deliberately (“bad faith”), or if it was just the case of police officers’ unawareness of jurisdiction principles.
Justice O’Connor
Justice O’Connor proposed the dissenting opinion, as she did not accept the necessity of the two-step interrogation at the outset of the trial. She was decisive that those procedures undermined the justice philosophy, and all people taken part in those sessions were not faithful to the court structure. Her dissenting opinion highlighted that Seibert was not forced into stating her first confession, so it was not coerced, no matter if the Miranda warnings were undermined or officers proclaimed the suspect her rights in the middle of the investigation. Only in case the initial statement was coerced it could be considered inadmissible, but the crucial aim of a court was to assess the outcomes of the crime and which circumstances caused an affair. The next point that O’Connor urged to reconsider was to alter the conditions of interrogations: testimony location, the time break between sessions, and the alternation of investigator identities. That approach would enable officers to conduct investigations in a question-warn practice in case the convict did not want to confess for their misdemeanors.
References
Kirshenbaum, J. M., Miller, M. K., Kaplan, T., Cramer, R. J., Trescher, S. A., & Neal, T. M. (2021). Development and validation of a general legal moral disengagement scale. Psychology, Crime & Law, 27(8), 751-778.
Rubin, A. B. (2021). The conservative court and torture attenuation. American University National Security Law Brief, 11(1), 3.