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Excerpts from pages 108-124
The FBI [having information that Charles Dickerson may
have been involved in a bank robbery] went to
Dickerson’s apartment on January 27, 1999. They entered
the apartment without a warrant and without Dickerson’s
consent. The agents asked Dickerson to accompany them to
the FBI field office in Washington, D.C. Upon reaching
the office, the agents interviewed Dickerson but did not
him of his Miranda rights prior to the
interrogation. Dickerson admitted to driving his
Oldsmobile Ciera in the general vicinity of the bank
robbery on the morning of January 24 but denied any
knowledge of a bank robbery.
When told that his apartment was being searched.
Dickerson decided to make a supplemental statement. After
receiving his written statement, the FBI advised
Dickerson of his Miranda rights. Dickerson signed
a standard FBI rights waiver form and he was then placed
under formal arrest. After Dickerson was charged with
one count of conspiracy to rob a bank and three counts
of using a gun during a bank robbery, Dickerson’s
lawyers filed a motion to suppress the confession he had
made shortly after his arrest. On July 1, 1997, the
district court issued an Order and Memorandum Opinion
suppressing Dickerson’s statements because he had not
been advised of his Miranda rights until after he
had completed his statement.
Federal prosecutors did not argue that
Dickerson’s statement was admissible under 18 USCA 3501.
The federal statute (for ease of reference called
“Section 3501”) was a political response to the 1966
Miranda decision. It had been passed by the U.S.
Congress “with the clear intent of restoring
voluntariness as a test for admitting confessions in
federal court. Although duly enacted by the United
States Congress and signed into law by the President of
the United States, the United States Department of
Justice has steadfastly refused to enforce the
provision.”
Dickerson’s defense lawyers at the trial court level did
not brief or argue 18 USCA 3501 either.
The pivotal section of Section 3501 says, “A confession
. . . shall be admissible in evidence if it is
voluntarily given.” No one disputes that Congress
enacted Section 3501 as part of the Omnibus Crime
Control Act of 1968, with the express purpose of
legislatively overruling Miranda and restoring
voluntariness as the test for admitting confessions in
federal courts. [Section 3501] was on the books for
thirty-two years and six executive branch
administrations, during which time the Supreme Court
never once considered whether Section 3501 overruled
Miranda.
No one ever pressed the question of whether Miranda
or Section 3501 governed the admissibility of
confessions in federal court. In fact, Justice Antonin
Scalia, in 1994, noted that Section 3501 “has been
studiously avoided by every Administration . . . since
its inception 25 years ago.”
Every prosecutor and every court simply ignored
Congress’s political attempt to overrule a
constitutional decision of the United States Supreme
Court until Attorney General Janet Reno wrote a letter
to Congress in 1997, asserting that Section 3501 was
“unconstitutional.”
Justice Scalia, on the other hand, expressed his concern
with the Department of Justice’s failure to enforce
Section 3501. “In addition to causing the federal
judiciary to confront a host of ‘Miranda’ issues
that might be entirely irrelevant under federal law,” he
wrote, “the Department of Justice’s failure to invoke
the provision may have produced - during an era of
intense national concern about the problem of run-away
crime - the acquittal and the non-prosecution of many
dangerous felons.”
The constitutional question of whether Section 3501 or
Miranda controlled the admissibility of
confessions in federal courts was raised sua sponte
(“on the court’s own volition”) by the Fourth Circuit.
The mere fact that this question was raised sua sponte
is salient. Neither side had raised any constitutional
issue at all, not to mention the question of why a
federal statute was never used by state or federal
prosecutors.
Dickerson’s case resulted in a full review of Miranda.
Nearly all of the arguments made by the Dickerson
opposing Miranda were based on the premise that
it was not constitutionally required. First and
foremost of the factors on the side contending that
Miranda was a constitutional decision was the
observation that both Miranda and two of its
companion cases had applied the rule in state courts,
and since 1966, the Court had consistently applied
Miranda’s rule to prosecutions arising in state
courts. The Rehnquist Court acknowledged that there was
language in some of its opinions that could support the
opposing argument. However, the Court obviously wished
to disabuse all who might continue to foster that
notion.
Accordingly, the United States Supreme Court resolved
the thirty-four-year debate over Miranda’s fate,
specifying in its core holding that certain warnings
must be given before a suspect’s statement made during
custodial interrogation could be admitted into evidence.
The opinion also dealt with the congressional response
to Miranda in 18 USC 3501. Chief Justice
Rehnquist, joined in the opinion by six other justices,
with Justices Scalia and Thomas dissenting, delivered
the opinion on June 25, 2000, the crucial holding of
which is as follows:
The Dickerson opinion is a history lesson (citing
cases from the King’s Bench in England in the sixteenth
century,
a primer on constitutional law (citing constitutional
law precedents from 1884
through 1936,
and a shining example of judicial rhetoric (“custodial
interrogation takes a heavy toll on individual liberty
and trades on the weakness of individuals”).
With respect to proceedings in state courts, the Supreme
Court’s authority is limited to enforcing the commands
of the United States Constitution. The Miranda
opinion itself had begun by stating that the Court
granted certiorari to explore some facets of the
problems of applying the privilege of self-incrimination
to in-custody interrogation and to give concrete
constitutional guidelines for law enforcement agencies
and courts to follow. Indeed, the Court’s conclusion in
Dickerson was that the unwarned confessions
obtained in the four cases before the Court in
Miranda “were obtained from the defendant under
circumstances that did not meet constitutional standards
for protection of the privilege.”
The most compelling aspect of the Dickerson
decision, irrespective of judicial ideology or the
political persuasion of the moment, is that it relies on
the same underlying values as Miranda, values
that so bitterly separated the civil libertarians from
the law enforcement community for three decades. “We
need not go farther than Miranda to decide this
case,” the Dickerson opinion states. And
furthermore:
In Miranda, the Court noted that reliance on the
traditional totality-of-the-circumstances test raised a
risk of overlooking an involuntary custodial confession.
[That is] a risk that the Court found unacceptably great
when the confession is offered in the case in chief to
prove guilt. The Court therefore concluded that
something more than the totality test was necessary.
Section 3501 reinstates the totality test as sufficient.
Section 3501 therefore cannot be sustained if Miranda
is to remain law.
“In sum,” closed the Dickerson opinion, “we
conclude that Miranda announced a constitutional
rule that Congress may not supersede legislatively.
Following the rule of stare decisis, we decline
to overrule Miranda ourselves.”
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