A confusing ruling

Opinion: June 6, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

A confusing ruling

Los Angeles Times: As viewers of “Law & Order” know, criminal suspects in custody must be advised of their right to remain silent. But after a Michigan man exercised that right by refusing to talk to police for nearly three hours, his interrogators asked him if he had asked God for forgiveness for shooting another man to death. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that his one-word answer — “Yes” — was admissible because he hadn’t explicitly invoked his right to silence to stop the police questioning. It’s an unjust outcome and a problematic one for future application of the Miranda rule.

The situation that gave rise to Tuesday’s ruling was a complicated one: Van Chester Thompkins was advised of his right to remain silent, though he refused to sign a statement indicating that he understood his rights. For nearly three hours of questioning in an 8-by-10-foot room, Thompkins remained mostly silent, making only brief and inconsequential comments, including a remark about the hardness of his chair.

Sometimes silence will reflect a belief by the suspect that he is successfully asserting his right not to speak (a mistake some suspects will make even after this decision). In other situations, silence may simply be a temporary reaction to being in custody, or a sign that the suspect is weighing whether it’s in his interest to talk.

The court should have clarified that ambiguity by amending the Miranda rule to require police to tell a suspect at the outset that if he wants to assert his right to silence, he must say so. Unlike that clear rule, Tuesday’s ruling is likely to sow the confusion Miranda was designed to eliminate.