Page:United States Reports, Volume 542.djvu/640

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(a) Failure to give Miranda warnings and obtain a waiver of rights before custodial questioning generally requires exclusion of any statements obtained. Conversely, giving the warnings and getting a waiver generally produces a virtual ticket of admissibility, with most litigation over voluntariness ending with valid waiver ﬁnding. This common consequence would not be at all common unless Miranda warnings were customarily given under circumstances that reasonably suggest a real choice between talking and not talking. Pp. 607–609.

(b) Dickerson v. United States,, reaffirmed Miranda, holding that Miranda's constitutional character prevailed against a federal statute that sought to restore the old regime of giving no warnings and litigating most statements' voluntariness. The technique of interrogating in successive, unwarned and warned phases raises a new challenge to Miranda. Pp. 609–611.

(c) When a confession so obtained is offered and challenged, attention must be paid to the conﬂicting objects of Miranda and the question ﬁrst strategy. Miranda addressed "interrogation practices likely to disable [an individual] from making a free and rational choice" about speaking, 384 U. S., at 464–465, and held that a suspect must be "adequately and effectively" advised of the choice the Constitution guarantees, id., at 467. Question ﬁrst's object, however, is to render Miranda warnings ineffective by waiting to give them until after the suspect has already confessed. The threshold question in this situation is whether it would be reasonable to ﬁnd that the warnings could function "effectively" as Miranda requires. There is no doubt about the answer. By any objective measure, it is likely that warnings withheld until after interrogation and confession will be ineffective in preparing a suspect for successive interrogation, close in time and similar in content. The manifest purpose of question ﬁrst is to get a confession the suspect would not make if he understood his rights at the outset. When the warnings are inserted in the midst of coordinated and continuing interrogation, they are likely to mislead and "deprive a defendant of knowledge essential to his ability to understand the nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them." Moran v. Burbine,, 424. And it would be unrealistic to treat two spates of integrated and proximately conducted questioning as independent interrogations subject to independent evaluation simply because Miranda warnings formally punctuate them in the middle. Pp. 611–614.

(d) Elstad does not authorize admission of a confession repeated under the question ﬁrst strategy. The contrast between Elstad and this case reveals relevant facts bearing on whether midstream Miranda warnings could be effective to accomplish their object: the completeness and detail of the questions and answers to the ﬁrst round of questioning,