Recently, Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a suspect in police questioning must vocalize the right to remain silent. The case is Berghuis vs Thompkins No. 08–1470, argued on March 1, 2010 and decided on June 1, 2010. This has to be cheerful news for police officers and proponents of victim’s rights. Logically, this is counter intuitive but it is consistent with our desire for dharma.
The Court’s opinion is,
In sum, a suspect who has received and understood the Miranda warnings, and has not invoked his Miranda rights, waives the right to remain silent by making an uncoerced statement to the police. Thompkins did not invoke his right to remain silent and stop the questioning. Understanding his rights in full, he waived his right to remain silent by making a voluntary statement to the police. The police, moreover, were not required to obtain a waiver of Thompkins’s right to remain silent before interrogating him.
Shown below are images from the opinion of the Supreme Court,
Assenting opinion
Dissenting Opinion
In a discussion of this matter, authors William Rosenzweig and Daniel Shatz of Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, point out that,
NACDL (National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers) points out that “widely-used” training manuals indicate that “what the detectives did in this case—keep after Thompkins in the face of his extended silence departed substantially from standard police practice.”
Thompkins was silent for about 2 hours and 45 minutes.
I am a Civil Engineer from Louisiana State University. The compound word, Americaneer, is a combination of the words, American and Engineer.