Abstract
Miranda v. Arizona is the best known criminal procedure decision in the history of the Supreme Court. It has spawned dozens of books and hundreds of articles. The world does not need another Miranda book unless it has something new and interesting to tell readers. Unfortunately, to borrow an old cliche, the parts of Gary Stuart’s book that are new are, for the most part, not interesting and the parts that are interesting are, for the most part, not new. Stuart adds material to the Miranda storehouse about the involvement of local Arizona lawyers and judges in the original case, but he does not persuade that they played a critical part in shaping the future that became Miranda. He omits entirely Yale Kamisar, even though Kamisar's 1965 article provided the conceptual basis for the Miranda approach to the interrogation problem. Beyond his odd choices about what to include and what to omit, Stuart tells a messy, sometimes erroneous, and pretty trite story about the importance of Miranda in the American scheme of justice. He is so absorbed in telling this story that he misses what is, in my judgment, the real story: Miranda has had precious little effect in the police interrogation room.
Disciplines
Criminal Law | Criminal Procedure
Date of this Version
June 2005
Recommended Citation
George C. Thomas III, "Missing Miranda's Story, A Review of Gary L. Stuart's, Miranda: The Story of America's Right to Remain Silent" (June 2005). Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers. Working Paper 23.
https://law.bepress.com/rutgersnewarklwps/art23
Comments
This paper appears at 2 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 677 (2005).