And what is a "criminals rights"? The answer is they have the same "rights" as anyone else. What they actually receive are several WARNINGS, not rights! Miranda is Not and has NEVER been a right! Why this ever became a commonly used term for Miranda I will never know because it is a warning to them, to keep their mouths shut and if they don't, anything they say can/will be used against them. Just another one of those terms that people continually misuse and no one ever corrects. You can spend years searching the Constitution and Bill of Rights and you will never see the term "Miranda" anywhere in them. And don't kid yourself for a second, the bad guys know Miranda better than most cops, prosecutors and lawyers and when to ask for a lawyer. In 30 years of doing cop work Miranda never bothered me at all. In most cases when an suspect invokes his Miranda Warnings I knew I had him by the short hairs and had the right person. It is all nothing more than a big game made more complex by.....(Surprise!) lawyers looking for a loophole for their client. Remember too that Miranda Warnings don't have to be given if a suspect isn't asked questions about his/her involvement in a specific event. It's all really quite simple.
As for obtaining a search warrant, this too is no big deal and in fact made my job easier. It was just another hurdle to get over and now search warrants in most jurisdictions can be obtained in minutes instead of hours or days. Once a warrant is in hand little can be done by a suspect to stave off the inevitable.
Rick H.
Agree.
Miranda (and before that Escobedo and Dorado) was not a problem. Miranda is only necessary when both custody (arrest, not temporary detention) and interrogation are present. Rick H. nailed it as far as I am concerned. An individual invoking his/her Miranda rights has good reasons to do so. My experience was always that innocent persons, when accused of the commission of a crime, immediately proclaim their innocence rather than leaving that question open while invoking their Miranda rights. Either way, when the suspect did invoke their Miranda rights, we walked away from any further interrogation.
In some cases, murders, where we knew the suspect was guilty, we may have had to wait for years, but we did get it, via DNA. In each of these cases, our suspect was indeed guilty. They had not invoked their Miranda rights. They just lied. But we had no way to rebut those lies. Did defense counsel know this? I don't know, despite how obvious it was to us.
So a question: In cases such as I have cited above, where a guilty person evades conviction for decades, who benefits and who loses? Clearly the suspect benefits because all this time he is free. Does LE lose? Except for those who investigated the case and it became part of them (which happened to a very close friend of mine and it killed him), not the rest of LE, because there are always so many other cases that keep on coming. That leaves society. Society expects the criminal justice system to put away such individuals, but instead such individuals are free to continue to endanger society.
Search warrants were/are not an obstacle, provided we had probable cause. If not, no warrant, so don't apply.
We used search warrants a lot in patrol, but a lot more in detectives because what we were investigating was after the fact.
I always counselled my troops that if they had probable cause to search, but there was no hurry, to get the S/W to have the protection of judicial review. A frequent instance of this was on vehicle stops on major cases, where we knew there was evidence inside the car, and thus sufficient P/C to search. By impounding the car and getting the warrant the opportunity for defense counsel to contest the legality of the search is greatly limited.
I had my troops convinced that a search warrant was their best friend. The other side of that coin is that search warrants are defense counsel's worst enemy, because of less opportunity for courtroom theatrics and gymnastics to try to obfuscate the issue of guilt.
So the generalization of "...said no cop ever.." is, in my opinion, indicative of a lack of knowledge of how law enforcement investigations really do work.
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