A Turf Battle’s Unlikely Victim
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Timing, in constitutional law no less than in life or love, can mean everything, and when it came to timing, the opponents of the Miranda decision who finally managed to push the Supreme Court into revisiting the case after 34 years turned out to have been spectacularly unlucky. There might well have been a period, sometime in the last three decades, when the court would have overturned Miranda, a bitterly fought 5-to-4 decision that had appeared ever since to have an ever more fragile hold on the court’s loyalties. But it was the bad fortune of opponents finally to get the justices’ attention at the very moment when the court’s interest in protecting its constitutional turf against Congressional incursions was at a peak unmatched in recent years. At issue in the case decided on Monday was a 1968 law by which Congress sought to overturn Miranda by replacing the familiar warnings with the case-by-case test of a confession’s ”voluntariness” that the Miranda decision found constitutionally inadequate. The notion that Congress would tell the court what the Constitution does or does not mean undoubtedly would have offended the court when the law was passed. By this year, when the court got its first chance to rule on the law, the idea was anathema, and a much more conservative group of justices than the members of the Warren Court who had struggled over the confession issue 34 years ago struck down the law and reaffirmed Miranda by a 7-to-2 vote. In a real sense, the surprisingly lopsided decision this week said more about the court itself than about Miranda or about defendants’ rights in general. More : query.nytimes.com |