Corley v. United States
From ScotusWiki
Authorship: Daniel Matro
Contents |
[edit] Briefs and Documents
Docket: 07-10441
Issue: Whether federal law permits the suppression of a voluntary confession made more than six hours after arrest but before presentment to a magistrate, as a consequence of unreasonable delay in presentment.
- Opinion below (3rd Circuit)
- Petition for certiorari
- Brief in opposition
- Petitioner’s reply
- Brief amicus curiae of National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers
Merit Briefs:
- Brief for Petitioner Johnnie Corley
- Brief for Respondent United States of America
- Reply of Petitioner Johnnie Corely
Amicus Briefs:
Oral Argument: Transcript
Decision: VACATED AND REMANDED in an opinion by Justice Souter
[edit] Pre-Argument Articles
[edit] Grant write-up
[edit] Argument Preview
In a series of cases in the 1940s and 1950s, the Supreme Court, acting pursuant to its supervisory authority over the federal courts, developed the McNabb-Mallory rule, which protects an arrested person’s right to be promptly presented before a magistrate by excluding, in federal prosecutions, any confession made during a period of unnecessary presentment delay. Alarmed by the burden this exclusionary rule placed on law enforcement, Congress revised the law governing admissibility of confessions in 1968 with the enactment of 18 U.S.C. § 3501. In Corley v. United States, the Supreme Court will consider whether Congress intended in 18 U.S.C. § 3501 to abrogate the McNabb-Mallory rule entirely or rather merely limit its application to confessions taken more than six hours after arrest and before presentment.
[edit] Background
The Supreme Court first addressed the right to prompt presentment in the 1943 case McNabb v. United States. In McNabb, the Court held inadmissible confessions that it found to have been obtained in violation of the defendants’ statutory right to prompt presentment. Three years later, the statutes upon which the Court relied in McNabb were superseded by Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 5(a). The current version of Rule 5(a), which is substantially similar to the original, requires that “[a] person making an arrest within the United States must take the defendant without unnecessary delay before a magistrate judge.” In 1957, in Mallory v. United States, the Court reaffirmed McNabb and held that delay for the purpose of interrogation is “unnecessary delay” under Rule 5(a). The exclusionary remedy it applied became known as the McNabb-Mallory rule.
In response to the McNabb-Mallory rule (and the rule promulgated in Miranda v. Arizona), Congress enacted 18 U.S.C. § 3501 as part of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Section 3501(a) provides that, in federal prosecutions, “a confession . . . shall be admissible in evidence if it is voluntarily given.” Section 3501(b) sets out a non-exclusive list of factors to be considered by the trial judge in determining voluntariness under the totality of the circumstances, one of which is the time elapsed between arrest and presentment if the confession was made during that time. Section 3501(c) addresses the circumstances under which presentment delay alone may render confessions inadmissible: a confession made by a person in police custody after arrest “shall not be inadmissible solely because of delay in bringing such person before a magistrate . . . if such confession is found by the trial judge to have been made voluntarily and if the weight to be given the confession is left to the jury and if such confession was made or given by such person within six hours immediately following his arrest.” Section 3501(c) further provides that the six-hour time limitation shall not apply in cases involving delays beyond six hours if the trial judge finds the delay “reasonable considering the means of transportation and the distance to be traveled to the nearest available such magistrate.”
Section 3501(c) thus carves out a six-hour safe harbor period from the McNabb-Mallory rule: any confession made during this time may not be deemed inadmissible solely because of a presentment delay. Less clear – and the subject of a longstanding circuit split – is whether the McNabb-Mallory rule survives as a basis for excluding confessions made beyond the six hour period. The difficulty stems from the tension between § 3501(a), which appears to make voluntariness the sole non-constitutional criterion for admissibility of confessions in federal prosecutions, and § 3501(c), which arguably contemplates the exclusion of even voluntary confessions made more than six hours after arrest if the delay is unreasonable. In 1993, the Court granted certiorari in a case raising this issue, United States v. Alvarez-Sanchez, but ultimately disposed of the case on other grounds.
Corley v. United States presents the Court with another opportunity to resolve the question. At 8:00 a.m. on September 17, 2003, petitioner Johnnie Corley was arrested after law enforcement officials identified him as a suspect in a June 2003 robbery of a Pennsylvania credit union. After his arrest but before being presented to a magistrate, Corley was taken to a local police station, then to a Philadelphia hospital for treatment of a hand injury he sustained while attempting to resist arrest, and finally to the FBI office in Philadelphia. There, officers began to discuss with him the bank robbery at 3:50 p.m., nearly eight hours after the arrest. Corley signed a waiver of rights form at 5:07 p.m. and gave an oral confession shortly thereafter. But when asked to put his confession in writing, he said he was tired and asked to continue the following day. The interrogation resumed at 10:30 a.m. the next day. Corley signed a written confession and was brought before a federal magistrate judge at 1:30 p.m., 29.5 hours after arrest.
Corley moved to exclude his oral and written confessions on the ground that they were obtained in violation of Rule 5(a). The district court judge found that both confessions were voluntary and denied the motion. After a jury trial, Corley was convicted of conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery and armed bank robbery. On appeal, the Third Circuit affirmed. Relying on the Third Circuit’s 1974 decision in Government of Virgin Islands v. Gereau, the panel majority held that § 3501 makes voluntariness the sole criterion for admissibility of a confession, replacing Rule 5(a)’s “unnecessary delay” standard. It interpreted § 3501(c) as merely instructing that an unnecessary delay in presentment, standing alone, cannot render a confession involuntary if the delay is less than six hours. Thus, in the court’s view, voluntary statements are admissible even if obtained outside the six-hour time period in § 3501(c) as a result of unreasonable delay. The majority acknowledged that several circuits had rejected this interpretation, and remarked that, “[w]ere we writing on a clean slate, we might agree.” But it deemed itself bound by Gereau’s “plausible” reading of § 3501(c).
In dissent, Judge Sloviter, relying on McNabb, Mallory, and Rule 5(a), argued that “even a voluntary statement may be excluded if the presentment delay is unreasonable or unnecessary.” In her view, § 3501(c) merely “excised the first six hours after arrest or detention from the scope of the McNabb-Mallory exclusionary rule.”
[edit] Petition for Certiorari
Corley filed a petition for certiorari, which was granted on October 1, 2008.
Corley’s petition advanced several arguments. First, Corley argued that the Court should grant the writ to resolve an entrenched 5-3 circuit split, and noted that the Court had previously agreed to hear a case raising the same issue. To highlight the importance of the issue, Corley observed that it can potentially arise in every federal criminal case. And to underscore the need for uniformity, he pointed out that the presentment rules which federal agents must follow currently depend on the federal district in which they operate.
Corley also argued that his case presents an ideal vehicle for resolution of the circuit split: there are no disputes over the timing of the confessions or any other essential facts; the only reason for the delay in presentment following Corley’s medical treatment was the agents’ desire to question him and elicit a confession; and the confession was the primary evidence linking Corley to the robbery.
Corley further argued that the Third Circuit’s interpretation cannot be reconciled with the text of § 3501(c), pursuant to which the admissibility of a confession expressly hinges on both voluntariness and presentment within six hours of arrest. The Third Circuit’s assertion that admissibility depends only on voluntariness, he maintained, renders § 3501(c) superfluous. Instead, the best interpretation of § 3501(c) is that it simply creates a six-hour safe harbor from the McNabb-Mallory rule but does not eliminate it.
In its brief in opposition, the United States acknowledged the circuit split but argued that the Court’s review was unnecessary because “the conflict has generated relatively few decisions in recent years,” and it affects the outcome in only a very small category of cases. In any event, the government suggested, “other legal rules (such as Miranda) largely protect against the abuses at which McNabb and Mallory were originally aimed.”
Furthermore, the government defended the Third Circuit’s holding that § 3501 displaces the McNabb-Mallory rule, asserting that § 3501(a) expressly makes voluntariness the sole non-constitutional test for determining the admissibility of confessions in federal prosecutions. The government insisted that the negative implication of § 3501(c) – “that there must be some circumstances in which a delay in presentment will render suppression appropriate regardless of whether a confession was voluntary” – could not override the plain language of § 3501(a) and, regardless, could be construed in a manner consistent with it.
In an amicus brief in support of Corley’s petition for certiorari, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) emphasized the need for a bright-line rule to give clear guidance to law enforcement. Reading § 3501(c) to create a six-hour safe harbor, it argued, provides clarity and consistency, whereas the Third Circuit’s interpretation requires difficult and uncertain determinations of voluntariness in every case involving a challenged confession.
[edit] Merits Briefing
In his brief on the merits, Corley expands on his petition’s argument that the plain text of § 3501(c) creates an exception to the McNabb-Mallory rule for statements made within six hours of arrest but leaves the rule intact for statements made after that time period. Corley argues that this interpretation is supported by five principles of statutory construction. First, interpreting § 3501 as making voluntariness the sole criterion of admissibility renders § 3501(c) superfluous and thereby violates the rule of construction that courts should give effect to every provision in a statute when possible. Second, to the extent that subsections (a) and (c) are in tension, the specific provision in § 3501(c) controls over the general statement in § 3501(a) on the issue of inadmissibility due solely to presentment delay. Third, to avoid rendering § 3501(c) superfluous, the Third Circuit had to substitute the word “involuntary” for “inadmissible” in the phrase “inadmissible solely because of delay” and had to add the word “otherwise” before “voluntary[il]y,” in conflict with the principle that statutes not be rewritten to reach a particular interpretation. Fourth, to the extent that either reading is plausible, the Third Circuit’s interpretation should be rejected because, by narrowing the grounds on which a court may find a confession involuntary, it raises constitutional problems. Fifth, the statute should be interpreted in accordance with its text and structure, both of which make clear that voluntariness is not the sole criterion in § 3501(c)
Corley also argues that the legislative history of § 3501 confirms his interpretation. According to Corley, the originally proposed text of § 3501(c) clearly abrogated the McNabb-Mallory rule, but that version encountered significant opposition and was amended before passage in a compromise that legislators understood as partially preserving the rule. Sections 3501(a) and (b) were understood to overrule Miranda, not McNabb and Mallory.
Corley further argues that his interpretation will be beneficial to law enforcement and the courts because it establishes an easily administrable bright-line rule. He also contends that the McNabb-Mallory rule, as preserved by § 3501(c), is a “necessary adjunct” to Miranda, ensuring that presentment delay itself is not used as a means to pressure arrested persons to waive their rights. (NACDL’s amicus brief in support of Corley at the merits stage presents this argument in greater detail.) Finally, Corley concludes that, because his confessions were taken outside the six-hour safe harbor and because the delay in presentment was unnecessary and unreasonable, his confessions were inadmissible.
In its brief on the merits, the United States begins with the statute’s text. The government argues that § 3501(a) plainly requires the admission of voluntary confessions. At the same time, it contends, § 3501(c) does not mandate the exclusion of any confession. Noting the Court’s reluctance to adopt exclusionary rules in light of their great societal costs, the government emphasizes that “Congress should not be presumed to have adopted such a rule without explicitly saying so.”
The government next argues that § 3501(c)’s “negative implication,” from which Corley derives an exclusionary rule, cannot override § 3501(a)’s affirmative command. It also suggests that consistent application of the negative-implication principle produces untenable results, because it would mean that § 3501(c)’s narrow travel-related exception would be the only excuse that could render a delay of more than six hours “reasonable” or “necessary.” And it makes the case that “Federal Rule of Evidence 402 eliminated [any] remaining vestige of McNabb-Mallory.”
The government also contests Corley’s use of principles of statutory construction. First, it argues that the interpretive principle that a specific provision trumps a general one is inapplicable because there is no conflict between subsections (a) and (c). Second, § 3501(c) is not superfluous simply because it provides a clarification of the law of admissibility in one particular situation that is identical to the result produced by applying the general voluntariness rule. And it contends that there is no need to rewrite § 3501(c) to see it as a reiteration of § 3501(a)’s command of voluntariness as applied to a particular situation. Third, it rejects Corley’s claim that the Third Circuit’s interpretation is constitutionally doubtful, insisting that Corley cannot identity any situation in which that reading raises serious constitutional concerns.
The government further argues that although the text alone answers the question presented, making resort to legislative history unnecessary, that history also supports its position. Among other points, the government maintains that the amendment to the original version of § 3501(c) was not a compromise that partially preserved the McNabb-Mallory rule, but a minor change intended to alleviate any constitutional problems were the bill interpreted to preclude suppression of a confession taken after a delay of several days.
Finally, in response to Corley’s policy arguments, the United States asserts that “in light of Miranda, Fourth Amendment restraints, and voluntariness doctrine, no necessity exists for a non-constitutional suppression rule based solely on delayed presentment.”
In his reply brief, Corley first argues that § 3501(c) preserves the McNabb-Mallory rule not by “negative implication” but by its express terms. Section 3501(c) provides that confessions “shall not be inadmissible solely because of delay” – that is, the McNabb-Mallory rule shall not apply – when two conditions are met: the confession is made voluntarily and within six hours of arrest. The government’s insistence that voluntariness is the sole test for admissibility of confessions does not merely render some of § 3501(c) harmlessly redundant, as it claims, but renders the entire provision a nullity, and requires an unacceptable rewriting of the text.
Corley also rejects the government’s argument that Federal Rule of Evidence 402 abolishes the McNabb-Mallory rule, asserting, among other things, that the Advisory Committee Note to Rule 402 expressly excepts evidence excluded under McNabb-Mallory from its general principle of admissibility. In addition, Corley insists that the government fails to rebut the legislative history’s “clear confirmation” of his view, and emphasizes that the government’s reading of § 3501(c) as a “voluntariness safe harbor” finds “no support whatsoever” in that history. And, discussing the policy rationales for a decision in his favor, Corley argues that the “prompt presentment right is broader than the rights guarded by Miranda” and cannot be safeguarded by Miranda warnings alone.
[edit] Oral Argument Recap
On Wednesday, the Court debated the fate of the McNabb-Mallory rule in light of Congress’s 1968 enactment of 18 U.S.C. § 3501 and the Court’s Miranda jurisprudence. The Court grappled, as the briefs did, with how to read § 3501(a) and § 3501(c) together: the former seems to make voluntariness the sole non-constitutional criterion for admissibility of confessions in federal prosecutions, while the latter arguably suggests that even voluntary confessions might be excluded if made more than six hours after arrest and the delay was unreasonable.
Assistant Federal Defender David McColgin, arguing for petitioner Corley, sought to convince the Court that § 3501(c) carves out a six-hour safe harbor from the existing McNabb-Mallory rule and leaves the rule otherwise intact. Congress, he argued, “structured the statute on the foundation of McNabb-Mallory,” and therefore the “time limitation” provision in § 3501(c) must be read as a signal of Congress’s intent to limit, not eliminate the rule. Justice Alito pointed out that there is a difference in saying that § 3501(c) codified the supervisory rule adopted by the Court in McNabb-Mallory and saying that it created an exception to this rule to the extent that the rule remains in place. Justice Kennedy completed the thought, suggesting the possibility that § 3501(c) creates a six-hour safe harbor, but beyond that safe harbor leaves the Court “free to reexamine its supervisory rule in light of what Congress has provided in (a) and (b) of the statute.” It is “a little bit odd,” he said, to think that Congress would build a statute around a supervisory rule while taking away the Court’s authority to reconsider the supervisory rule.
In response, McColgin argued that, even if the Court has the authority to reconsider the rule, it should respect Congress’s choice in 1968 to leave McNabb-Mallory protection in place for confessions made outside the six-hour safe harbor. Picking up on arguments raised by the government in its brief, the Chief Justice and Justices Alito and Scalia proceeded to question whether the text of § 3501 in fact supported that interpretation of what Congress did: Couldn’t § 3501(c) simply be read as a voluntariness safe harbor? Even if this requires some rewriting of the text, doesn’t petitioner’s interpretation require reading § 3501(a) to mean something different from what it says? Outside the safe harbor, wouldn’t the normal voluntariness analysis apply, under which multiple factors, including delay, are considered? The ensuing discussion replayed the arguments in the briefs, with each side pointing out the textual obstacles to the other’s reading.
Justice Kennedy then shifted the discussion to focus on the purpose behind McNabb-Mallory’s exclusionary remedy, and in particular, whether the suppression of a voluntary confession is a necessary or appropriate mechanism for enforcing the right to prompt presentment. If the confession is voluntary, he asked, isn’t suppression a “wholly unrelated remedy”? McColgin responded by emphasizing the inherent coercive pressures that stem from a delay in presentment, and the need for a prophylactic rule that creates an incentive to promptly present. Responding to Justice Stevens’s apparently friendly question whether any other remedy would enforce the interest in prompt presentment, McColgin answered that without McNabb-Mallory, “this becomes an empty right.”
Arguing for respondent United States, Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben began by emphasizing that the Court developed the McNabb-Mallory rule prior to Miranda, when there was no constitutional law requiring that suspects be advised of their rights. The rule ensured that suspects would be brought promptly before a magistrate to be advised of those rights. Justice Stevens countered that McNabb was also designed to safeguard the right to prompt presentment itself, and that the incentive it provided government to respect that right was no less necessary today than back then. In response to Justice Scalia’s suggestion that the police would still want to avoid any delay that would lead a Court to deem a confession involuntary, Justice Stevens disagreed, arguing that under that scheme police “have everything to gain and nothing to lose by continuing to interrogate.”
Dreeben turned to the text of § 3501, which in his view carves out a six-hour safe harbor during which delay alone can never be the basis for suppressing a confession, but leaves admissibility outside that time period to be determined by other sources of law. Those sources, he suggested, do not include the non-constitutional McNabb-Mallory rule, but instead § 3501(a) and Federal Rule of Evidence 402, which supersede the rule and eliminate it. Responding to questioning from Justices Stevens and Breyer, Dreeben conceded that his interpretation of § 3501 rendered § 3501(c) largely superfluous, and that nothing in the legislative history reflects Congress’s intent for § 3501(a) to overrule McNabb-Mallory. Dreeben went on to argue that, even if McNabb-Mallory survived § 3501, it was overridden in 1975 by Federal Rule of Evidence 402, which provides that only four sources of law may serve as the basis for excluding relevant evidence: the Constitution, an act of Congress, a rule of evidence, or other rules prescribed by the Supreme Court pursuant to statutory authority. After Rule 402, he asserted, relevant evidence may no longer be excluded on the basis of rules developed by the Court in its supervisory capacity. Answering Justice Ginsburg’s observation that Rule 5 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure prohibits unnecessary delay, Dreeben noted that the rule does not prescribe an enforcement mechanism.
Dreeben closed with a return to his opening theme, characterizing the McNabb-Mallory rule as the product of a supervisory decision made in an entirely different legal climate. In light of the Court’s Miranda jurisprudence and subsequent legislation, any benefits of using the McNabb-Mallory rule to enforce a prompt presentment requirement do not justify the costs of excluding probative, voluntary confessions.
In a brief rebuttal, McColgin sought to refute the claim that Rule 402 overturned McNabb-Mallory. First, he noted, the Advisory Committee Notes expressly state that Rule 402 does not abrogate the McNabb-Mallory rule. Second, the citation in the Committee Notes to § 3501(c) indicates that the McNabb-Mallory rule was viewed as having a statutory basis. McColgin also insisted that the Court’s Miranda jurisprudence in no way diminishes the importance of the McNabb-Mallory rule, without which there would be nothing to stop law enforcement from delaying presentment for the purpose of obtaining confessions.
[edit] Opinion Analysis
Lyle Denniston originally wrote the following for SCOTUSblog
Rehabilitating one of the more controversial criminal law rulings of the “Warren Court,” a decision that decades ago stirred angry complaints from “tough-on-crime” politicians, a divided Supreme Court ruled on Monday that some confessions to a federal crime cannot be used even if they were given voluntarily. If federal agents waited too long to take a suspect to court to be told formally of the charges against him, the confession is barred however voluntary it may have been, the Court ruled 5-4 in a bank robbery case, Corley v. U.S. (07-10441).
A Court that has completely changed in membership since 1957 gave new life to their predecessors’ decision that year in Mallory v. U.S., a ruling intended to do away with secret interrogation that produced confessions to crime. Just as the modern Court in 2000 spared another “Warren Court” precedent, Miranda v. Arizona, from a congressional assault mounted years earlier, the majority on Monday did the same for Mallory.
On June 24, 1957, Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote for a unanimous Court in Mallory that a confession given seven hours after an individual had been arrested for a federal crime could not be used if there had been “unnecessary delay” in presenting the suspect to a magistrate to learn of the charge. The decision reinforced a 1943 decision in McNabb v. U.S., essentially to the same effect (and also written by Justice Frankfurter). Neither ruling was based on the Constitution, but rather on the Court’s supervisory power; Mallory was also based on a rule of criminal procedure for federal courts.
Congressional resentment rose promptly after the Mallory ruling, but reached a boiling point after the Court, in the Miranda decision in 1966, required that suspects be warned about their rights before police could question them about a crime. Miranda was a particular focus of conservative Republican senators in 1968, bistut Mallory came in for blistering criticism too. At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Justice Abe Fortas’ nomination to be Chief Justice, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina thundered: “Mallory! Mallory! I want that word to ring in your ears. He raped a woman and confessed it in court and the Supreme Court turned him loose on a technicality — free to commit other crimes!”
The upshot was enactment of a 1968 federal law, seeking to overrule Miranda but also, in separate sections, to put Mallory in doubt by saying voluntary confessions were to be admitted in most circumstances. (The Supreme Court scuttled the Miranda part of that law in Dickerson v. U.S. nine years ago, by placing Miranda on a constitutional footing beyond Congress’ reach.)
In recent years, a conflict has deepened among federal courts on how far Congress meant to go in 1968 toward scuttling Mallory. The Corley decision Monday resolved that dispute. Congress did not intend, Justice David H. Souter wrote for the majority, to “discard” Mallory, but “merely to narrow” it. Thus, voluntary confessions to federal crimes still are not to be admitted, if the suspect had not been taken to court fairly soon after confessing to officers. In general, that means the trip to court must come within six hours after an arrest.
“In a world without McNabb-Mallory, federal agents would be free to question suspects for extended periods before bringing them out in the open, and we have always known what custodial secrecy leads to,” Justice Souter wrote. “No one with any smattering of the history of 20th Century dictatorships needs a lecture on the subject…and there is mounting empirical evidence that these pressures can induce a frighteningly high percentage of people to confess to crimes they never committed.”
Souter added: “Justice Frankfurter’s point in McNabb is as fresh as ever: ‘The history of liberty has largely been the history of observance of procedural safeguards.’…McNabb-Mallory is one of them, and neither the text nor the history of [the 1968 law] makes out a case that Congress meant to do away with it.”
The 1968 law provides that a confession to a federal crime is to be admitted if a judge finds it was voluntarily given; it says that such a confession is not to be admitted “solely because of delay” in taking the suspect before a federal magistrate judge — provided that the voluntary confession had been made within six hours of arrest. Five Circuit Courts have ruled that the law makes voluntariness the sole test of admissibility. Three others have ruled that confessions made more than six hours after arrest are barred, if the delay was unreasonable in violation of federal criminal Rule 5. That was the split at issue in the Corley case.
That case involved a Pennsylvanian, Johnnie Corley, who was convicted of conspiracy to armed bank robbery and armed bank robbery. He was sentenced to 170 months in prison. The Third Circuit Court upheld his conviction, rejecting Corley’s challenge to the admission of verbal and written confessions he had given to federal agents. He had been taken to a magistrate some 29.5 hours after his arrest, even though federal agents had questioned him in the same building in which federal magistrate judges had their chambers.
The Circuit Court, following its own precedents, ruled that the 1968 law entirely abrogated the McNabb-Mallory rule and replaced it with a pure voluntariness test. Since there was no dispute that Corley’s confessions were voluntary, and were properly admitted regardless of whether the delay in taking him to court was unnecessary or unreasonable.
The Souter opinion overturning the Third Circuit said that that Court had not made a decision about the time of Corley’s confessions and the time of his appearance before a magistrate judge but had relied solely on the voluntariness finding. The case thus was returned for a new review.
Joining in the opinion were Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Anthony M. Kennedy and John Paul Stevens.
Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., wrote for the dissenters, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Alito wrote that the “unambiguous language” of the 1968 law made Corley’s voluntary confession admissible.
Moreover, the dissenters argued, the McNabb-Mallory rule, with its exclusion from trials of some voluntary confessions, is no longer clearly needed. They contended that the Court’s later requirement, in Miranda, that suspects in custody be warned of their rights provides suspects with the necessary protection that, in earlier times, they may have needed. “Now,” the dissenting opinion said, “Miranda ensures that arrestees receive such advice [of their rights] at an even earlier point, within moments after being taken into custody.”
