Crime Junkie - PRECEDENT: Ernesto Miranda

Episode Date: December 26, 2022

In 1963 Ernesto Miranda was arrested for kidnapping, rape and armed robbery. Ultimately, he gave police a confession but only because he didn’t know he had the option not to talk to them… or to get an attorney. Miranda’s path through the justice system set a precedent for informing those arrested of their rights. And now the Miranda Warning is something so engrained in us Crime Junkies we could probably recite it on our sleep.   Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/ to view the current membership options and policies.Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/precedent-ernesto-miranda/

Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers, and we mentioned at the end of last week's episode that Britt and I are going to take the holiday off to spend time with our families. But instead of leaving you without any content, I thought I'd come back with another precedent-setting story. One that, like our last precedent episode on John Brady, is all about ensuring there is transparency and balance leading up to an arrest or trial of an accused person. This one is about what happens at the time of someone's arrest. And if you have seen a single law and order episode, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about. Say it with me. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be

used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. You get it. Those brief few sentences should be part of any crime junkies vocabulary if you're ever quizzed about your fifth and sixth amendment rights. Each and every word in that warning is vitally important to all of us if we ever find ourselves being arrested and charged with a crime. The Miranda warning didn't always exist, though. And honestly, what it stands for wasn't even that important in America's criminal justice system prior to the late 1960s. That's when the arrest and subsequent interrogation of an Arizona man changed everything about what can and can't be used against a person if they talk to the police without being made

aware of their constitutional rights. Before there was a Miranda warning, there was Ernesto Miranda. This is his story. In the early morning hours of March 3, 1963, when Phoenix police officer Carol Cooley responded to a call about an 18 year old woman who had been kidnapped and raped, he was just one year into his new role as a detective and barely a month into his assignment with the department's crimes against people division. When Carol arrived at the young woman's home, he found the teenage victim, Patricia, in serious distress. Some reports indicate that Patricia may have had a slight mental disability, but that is not something that I could confirm

in the source material I found. Either way, it was clear to Carol after speaking with her that she could communicate well enough to explain in detail what happened to her. According to history.com, Patricia told the detective that she'd gotten off work at a movie theater in Phoenix and ridden a bus to a stop on her street. It was just after midnight when she stepped onto the sidewalk and she was just about home when a man jumped out of a driveway in front of her, covered her mouth with his hand and warned her not to scream. She said the man pulled her off the street and dragged her into his vehicle where he tied her hands behind her back and forced her to lay down in the back seat so

no one would see her. Then he drove her 20 minutes outside of the city to a secluded area and raped her. When the assault was over, the man threatened Patricia and demanded money. She gave him the $4 she had in her purse and then he drove her back into town and dropped her off a few blocks from her house. According to an article by Michael S. Leif and H. Mitchell Caldwell for American Heritage Magazine, at the hospital, the girl described her attacker as quote, Mexican male, 27 or 28 years old, 5 feet 11 inches, 175 pounds, slender build, medium complexion with black short cut curly hair wearing Levi's a white t-shirt and dark rimmed glasses, end quote. But when investigators asked her again later to describe her attacker,

she said he didn't have an accent and might have been either Mexican or Italian. She described the car as being green or maybe a gray color. She remembered the inside of the sedan had dark colored upholstery with stripes and it smelled like turpentine, which has this sort of like pine tree slash chemical oil smell. I mean, it's super distinct and not normally a smell you run into often, so it would definitely be memorable. After taking the report, Carol began investigating the case, but pretty quickly realized leads were slim. There were no witnesses to that crime other than the victim because the attack had happened so late at night. There was a vague description of a car, but other than that, that's all he had to go

on. Several days passed and nothing in terms of tips or information came in until a week after the attack when Patricia and one of her family members called police to report that they'd seen the same vehicle or at least one that looked like the same vehicle driving slowly past them on the same street where Patricia had been abducted. Now, I gotta believe Patricia and her family member were crime junkies before being a crime junkie was even a thing because they actually scribbled down three of the letters from the car's license plate and made a note about what year, make and model the car was. A 1953 Packard Sedan license plate DFL. If you're wondering, this car is exactly what you picture when you think of a 1950s vehicle.

It's low to the ground, it's made of steel and just has that drive-in movie theater 1950s vibe. Unfortunately, Carol learned that at the time there were thousands of Packards being driven in the state of Arizona. What he had to do was find the ones that were gray or green with a license plate that had the letters DFL on it. And it only took a day or two for him to narrow down his potential suspect pool down to just a handful of cars and owners. One of which was a woman named Twyla Hoffman. But it wasn't Twyla he was interested in. It was her live-in boyfriend and the father of her child, Ernesto Miranda. He was either 22 or 23 depending on the source material you read, and he was a former military

service member from Mesa, Arizona. Even more interesting to Carol was that Ernesto had a lengthy criminal record. He spent about 15 months enlisted in the Army but had deserted the service a few years earlier. According to documents from the Arizona State Archives, when Ernesto was a teenager and a young adult, he'd been arrested several times in several states for armed robbery, grand theft, peeping in people's windows, and an attempted rape among other crimes. So on March 13, just 10 days after the crime happened, Carol knocked on Twyla's front door. According to archived legal filings, when she answered, she was holding a baby on her hip and had two other small children standing at her feet. She told

police that Ernesto was sleeping and when the officers didn't blink or leave, she hollered for Ernesto to wake up. Ron Duggan writes for AZ Central that when Ernesto sleepily stumbled to the front door and asked the officers what they wanted, Carol told him, quote, we'd rather not talk to you about this in front of your family, end quote. Carol asked Ernesto to get dressed and ride with him to the Phoenix police station, which he did. At no point during that car ride or at the station was Ernesto placed in handcuffs or technically under arrest. He could have walked out at any point. Police questioned Ernesto about the rape, but they also took that opportunity to press him for information about another

violent crime, the robbery and attempted rape of a woman in downtown Phoenix that happened less than six months before. That would have been November 1962. Detectives brought in both victims, the woman who was robbed and Patricia, the 18 year old sexual assault victim. And they had Ernesto stand in a police lineup alongside three other Hispanic men his age. Both victims vaguely indicated that Ernesto may have been the man who attacked them, but they couldn't say for sure. Ron Duggan reported for AZ Central that victims only rarely point at one person in a lineup and say, that's the guy, even though that's what we often see on TV. What's more common is for a victim to point at a

person in the lineup and say, he looks like the guy. And that's what happens here. Their identification of Ernesto wasn't aired tight, but it was enough for police to press their suspect further. By this time, Carol was sure Ernesto was the guy he was looking for. So when he went back to the interrogation room and Ernesto asked how he did, Carol told him he'd been positively identified by two women and then began an interrogation that lasted two hours. By the time it was over, Carol had a full written confession, one that included details of the crimes that matched information both victims had told authorities. History dot com reported that at one point

during the interrogation, investigators with the Phoenix police brought one of the victims into the same room as Ernesto and asked him, quote, is this the person you raped? And quote, Ernesto allegedly looked at the woman and said, quote, that's the girl. Sounds like kind of a slam dunk, right? Well, in a way, it was. When the case went to trial a few months later, Ernesto was convicted of both the 1962 robbery and the 1963 abduction and rape. The primary evidence used against him were his written and oral confessions. But here's the issue. Ernesto didn't know he had a constitutional right to remain silent and have an attorney, though both of those things were and are spelled out in the fifth and

sixth amendments to the US Constitution. And police didn't tell him. They didn't have to. Back in 1963, the law didn't require them to tell him. The fifth amendment states in part, quote, no person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. End quote. The sixth amendment states in part, quote, in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury of the state, be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, to be confronted with the witnesses against him, and to have the assistance

of counsel for his defense. End quote. That last part is critical. You have a constitutional right to speak to an attorney before answering any questions police throw at you. Ernesto Miranda didn't know that nor were police compelled by law to alert him to these rights. I mean, this is why we have the crime junkie rule. Always get a lawyer. According to archive court records, during his trials, Ernesto's lawyers tried to get his written confessions thrown out as evidence, arguing the confessions were inadmissible because he hadn't been made aware of his fifth and sixth amendment rights. But the judges in those cases had overruled them. And there was little his lawyers could do about it because up to that point,

no one had ever fought that fight in trial courts and won. There was no precedent. So Ernesto was convicted and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison for both crimes. But even with his conviction secured and prosecutors in Arizona celebrating a victory, Ernesto's legal fight in the courtroom was far from over. His battle was headed clear across the country out of Arizona and all the way to Washington, D.C. According to court records in late 1966, Ernesto appealed his rape and robbery convictions to the Arizona Supreme Court. He and his defense lawyer claimed that his constitutional rights were violated when Phoenix police officers interrogated him without a lawyer present.

They also argued that when it came to his written confessions, Ernesto had never been able to exercise his fifth amendment right to remain silent, otherwise known as his right not to incriminate himself. The appeal was arguing essentially that Ernesto did not get fair trials the first time around for the 1963 rape and the 1962 robbery. But the Arizona Supreme Court ruled against Ernesto and upheld the trial court's verdict. The confession stood. But he and his lawyers weren't taking no for an answer. They knew there was a serious issue at play here, that Ernesto's constitutional rights as an American had been violated. The prosecutors may have had evidence and argued a strong case that Ernesto was guilty, but

that didn't give him any less right to a fair trial. So Ernesto appealed again. And this time he had some serious legal heavy hitters in his corner. According to history.com, Ernesto's case had gotten the attention of a lawyer who worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, who recommended a well-known trial lawyer named John Flynn take over Ernesto's case and make an appeal to the US Supreme Court. The ACLU lawyer knew that John had a strong interest in criminal cases that dealt with complicated legal arguments and would likely be considered by the US Supreme Court. John accepted the challenge and roped in one of his good friends to help him represent Ernesto, a brilliant constitutional law attorney named

John Frank. In their brief filed to the Supreme Court, both Johns argued that all criminal defendants have constitutional rights to legal counsel and to remain silent and to not incriminate themselves. And that if those rights are not made clear to them prior to questioning, nothing the defendant says after that point should be allowed to be used as evidence to convict them. Now we all know that the justices on the Supreme Court read that argument brief or else we wouldn't be talking about this today. But real quick, I want to just tell you about how Ernesto's case was even selected by the Supreme Court in the first place because I think it's kind of bananas. According to several news reports, the Supreme Court

only reviewed 150 cases the year they ruled on Ernesto's case. Only a small portion of those 150 cases had to do with issues related to a person's Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. Well, Ernesto's case was reportedly picked because his name, Ernesto Arturo Miranda, was higher up alphabetically in the stack compared to the other cases in that pile of 150 documents. That's it. It is wild how the justice system works sometimes. Regardless of how his case made it in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, it did. And on June 13, 1966, in a five to four vote, the justices decided to reverse the Arizona Supreme Court's decision and ordered that Ernesto's conviction be vacated and that he be granted a new trial

in Arizona. As part of that decision, the Supreme Court justices concluded one crucial fact that unless police inform a person about their constitutional rights prior to any questioning, then what they said cannot be used against them as evidence. To quote the justices directly, they said, without proper safeguards, the process of in-custody interrogation of persons suspected or accused of crime contains inherently compelling pressures which work to undermine the individual's will to resist and to compel him to speak where he would otherwise do so freely. In other words, the very nature of a police interrogation is so intimidating that a suspect must be aware of their rights beforehand. Their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney

as a way to try and counterbalance that overwhelming intimidation. With their decision in the case of Ernesto Miranda, the U.S. Supreme Court established what we now know as the Miranda Warning. The most basic and common version of this warning goes like this. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand the rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to me? Once that warning is read, the rest is up to the person being questioned. When police

go over the phrase prior to asking any questions, it's what's referred to as mirandising. In the movies, we often see this happen while police are putting a person in handcuffs or leading them away. But something interesting I've found while researching this story is that according to USconstitution.net, you don't have to be mirandised to be arrested. You just have to be mirandised if the police intend on asking you questions. If police have enough probable cause and evidence to initiate an arrest, they can arrest you for a crime and not read you a Miranda warning. They can also ask you basic questions like what's your name, where do you live, what's your social security number, without a Miranda warning.

You must be mirandised and acknowledge your rights before being questioned about a case as a suspect. Otherwise, police cannot use what you say as evidence against you. If you're under arrest and you're not a suspect in a crime, there is no requirement to provide a Miranda warning either. According to US courts, after the Supreme Court overturned Ernesto's conviction, he was retried in Maricopa County, Arizona for his original crimes. In 1967, during his retrials, Ernesto's initial confession to Phoenix police were not allowed in court. But according to AZ Central, confessions he made to his now wife, Twyla, about the crimes were allowed. In fact, she took the stand during his second trial and testified that,

while he was in prison, Ernesto told her that he was responsible for everything. Once again, jurors found him guilty and he was sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison. According to Barry Silverman's reporting for Phoenix Magazine, after the landmark Supreme Court decision, Ernesto found a bit of fame amongst fellow prisoners. The phrase Miranda rights was once heard during a broadcast of a police show on the TV in Ernesto's cell block and when everyone heard it, they erupted in applause. He continued to capitalize on his newfound fame when he was paroled in 1972. Ernesto made money from autographing Miranda warning cards and selling them for a few dollars to people on the street. But even fame wasn't

enough to keep him on the straight and narrow. Not long after being paroled, Ernesto was sent back to prison for violating the conditions of his release. He spent three more years incarcerated before Arizona led him out again in December of 1975. Less than a month later, in January 1976, Ernesto was stabbed to death in a Phoenix bar during a fight over a few dollars he lost in a gambling game. He bled to death right there on the bar's bathroom floor. Police caught up with the man accused of killing Ernesto and, as was his right under the U.S. Constitution, he was read a Miranda warning. In Spanish, actually. Before police could make a solid case against that man, they had to let him go. And he was never

seen again. No one has ever been charged with Ernesto's murder. The Supreme Court's landmark decision in the case of Miranda v. Arizona did have its critics. Many who initially criticized the decision said that the ruling severely limited the police's ability to interrogate suspects of crimes. Some people in the legal and law enforcement communities have gone as far as to say the decision tipped the scales of justice in favor of criminals. But a Miranda warning doesn't stop law enforcement from getting confessions. Plenty of people still talk to police freely after their arrest, knowing full well they shouldn't and that what they say is fair game in a courtroom proceeding. Countless murderers and violent

criminals dig their own graves when they try to outsmart police or control interrogations. We've seen it time and time again with high-profile criminal cases. I say let the truly guilty ones keep doing that. Does a Miranda warning help protect bad guys? Maybe a little. I mean even without his confession, Ernesto Miranda was convicted of his crimes. Making sure suspects know and understand their rights doesn't prevent police and prosecutors from doing their jobs. It provides a layer of protection for everyone, especially the most vulnerable among us. Ernesto Miranda left a complicated legacy. Next week we're back to our regular crime junkie episodes, but in a few months I'm going to be back to talk about a different

kind of legacy and a story that changed the way kids would be raised forever. You won't want to miss that special bonus episode, so make sure you're following crime junkies so you get automatically notified of those bonus episodes, and I'll see you then. To find all the source material for this episode, you can go to our website, crimejunkiepodcast.com. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at CrimeJunkiePodcast, and we'll be back on Monday with a regularly scheduled episode. CrimeJunkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?