Twenty-six states and the District of Columbia have statutory, judicial, or self-imposed requirements that police questioning of arrested persons held in custody must be electronically recorded.

While the Miranda decision is an important part of our legal structure that in many instances serves to enforce the mandate of the Fifth Amendment, it has not been effective in greatly diminishing the number of involuntary confessions.

The enactment of 18 U.S.C. § 3501 was an attempt to replace the strict dictates of Miranda with the congressional version of a “totality of the circumstances” test. In Dickerson v. United States, however, the Supreme Court made it clear that the Miranda advisement is constitutionally based and thus not subject to modification by statute.

How effective are the Miranda warnings in protecting Miranda rights? Do arrestees understand the words and sentences? Richard Rogers and Eric Drogin discuss core misconceptions potentially compromising intelligent Miranda waivers.

Miranda has done little to reduce the risk of wrongful conviction resulting from false confessions. To successfully mount a false confession defense, attorneys must fashion persuasive answers to two questions: Why did the client falsely confess? How do we know it is a false confession?

Over the past 30 years, NACDL and California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (CACJ) helped shed light on the implications of police training on interrogation practices that were intended to circumvent Miranda to permit police to either initiate or continue questioning. Police training and interrogation practices received additional attention in 2004 when the U.S. Supreme Court decided Missouri v. Seibert.

The problem of unreliable confessions from juveniles still exists. For example, police officers used misguided techniques to elicit a confession from mentally limited teenager Brendan Dassey: they told him that everything would be “OK” as long as he told them what they already believed he had done; they fed him crucial nonpublic details, including that the deceased had been shot in the head; and they falsely led him to believe that he would be returned to school in time to finish a project – even after he confessed to rape and murder.

Paul Ulrich explains how he and other lawyers became involved in Ernesto Miranda’s case. The intense reaction to Miranda v. Arizona, he says, failed to recognize that the decision was not a major “suspects rights” victory. Instead, the decision was a compromise that favored the government.

To the extent interrogation practices have improved and police officers follow proper procedures, Miranda has had continuing value. Subsequent decisions, nevertheless, limited its application. Paul Ulrich explains how some of the issues have been resolved.