476
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
Mosley, 423 U. S. 96, 109 (1975) (White, J., concurring in result) ("[W]e have . . . rejected [the] paternalistic rule protecting a defendant from his intelligent and voluntary decisions about his own criminal case"). The costs to society of losing confessions would, moreover, be especially hard to bear where the suspect, if asked for his choice, would have chosen to continue. One need not sign the majority's opinion here to agree that resort to the rule petitioner argues for should be had only if experience shows that less drastic means of safeguarding suspects' constitutional rights are not up to the job, see generally United States v. Leon, 468 U. S. 897, 927- 928 (1984) (Blackmun, J., concurring) (exclusionary rule exception must be "tested in the real world of state and federal law enforcement, and this Court will attend to the results").
* * *
Our cases are best respected by a rule that when a suspect under custodial interrogation makes an ambiguous statement that might reasonably be understood as expressing a wish that a lawyer be summoned (and questioning cease), interrogators' questions should be confined to verifying whether the individual meant to ask for a lawyer. While there is reason to expect that trial courts will apply today's ruling sensibly (without requiring criminal suspects to speak with the discrimination of an Oxford don) and that interrogators will continue to follow what the Court rightly calls "good police practice" (compelled up to now by a substantial body of state and Circuit law), I believe that the case law under Miranda does not allow them to do otherwise.
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