706
Opinion of O'Connor, J.
Miranda was decided, it was well established that the Fifth Amendment prohibited the introduction of compelled or involuntary confessions at trial. And long before Miranda, the courts enforced that prohibition by asking a simple and direct question: Was "the confession the product of an essentially free and unconstrained choice," or was the defendant's will "overborne"? Schneckloth v. Bustamonte, 412 U. S., at 225 (quoting Culombe v. Connecticut, 367 U. S. 568, 602 (1961)); see ante, at 688-689; see, e. g., Bram v. United States, supra. Miranda's innovation was its introduction of the warning requirement: It commanded the police to issue warnings (or establish other procedural safeguards) before obtaining a statement through custodial interrogation. And it backed that prophylactic rule with a similarly prophylactic remedy—the requirement that unwarned custodial statements, even if wholly voluntary, be excluded at trial. Miranda, 384 U. S., at 444. Excluding violations of Miranda's prophylactic suppression requirement from habeas would not leave true Fifth Amendment violations unredressed. Prisoners still would be able to seek relief by "invok[ing] a substantive test of voluntariness" or demonstrating prohibited coercion directly. Johnson, 384 U. S., at 730; Elstad, 470 U. S., at 307-308 (statements falling outside Miranda's sweep analyzed under voluntariness standard). The Court concedes as much. Ante, at 693 ("[E]liminating habeas review of Miranda issues would not prevent a state prisoner from simply converting his barred Miranda claim into a due process claim that his conviction rested on an involuntary confession").
Excluding Miranda claims from habeas, then, denies collateral relief only in those cases in which the prisoner's statement was neither compelled nor involuntary but merely obtained without the benefit of Miranda's prophylactic warnings. The availability of a suppression remedy in such cases cannot be labeled a "fundamental trial right," for there is no constitutional right to the suppression of voluntary state-
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