U.S. Supreme Court Amends Miranda Rights

In a 5-4 vote, the United States Supreme Court expanded its limits on the Miranda rights, despite the dissent of newly appointed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, according to an Associated Press article.

The June 1 majority ruling said that suspects must break their silence and tell police they are going to remain quiet to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

“Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counterintuitively requires them to speak,” Sotomayor said. “At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.”

The ruling comes in a case in which a suspect, Van Chester Thompkins, remained mostly silent for a three-hour police interrogation before implicating himself in a Jan. 10, 2000, murder in Southfield, Mich.

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