Page:United States Reports, Volume 542.djvu/648

Rh waiver has generally produced a virtual ticket of admissibility; maintaining that a statement is involuntary even though given after warnings and voluntary waiver of rights requires unusual stamina, and litigation over voluntariness tends to end with the ﬁnding of a valid waiver. See Berkemer v. McCarty,, 433, n. 20 (1984) ("[C]ases in which a defendant can make a colorable argument that a self incriminating statement was 'compelled' despite the fact that the law enforcement authorities adhered to the dictates of Miranda are rare"). To point out the obvious, this common consequence would not be common at all were it not that Miranda warnings are customarily given under circumstances allowing for a real choice between talking and remaining silent.

There are those, of course, who preferred the old way of doing things, giving no warnings and litigating the voluntariness of any statement in nearly every instance. In the aftermath of Miranda, Congress even passed a statute seeking to restore that old regime,, although the Act lay dormant for years until ﬁnally invoked and challenged in Dickerson v. United States, supra. Dickerson re-affirmed Miranda and held that its constitutional character prevailed against the statute.

The technique of interrogating in successive, unwarned and warned phases raises a new challenge to Miranda. Although we have no statistics on the frequency of this practice, it is not conﬁned to Rolla, Missouri. An ofﬁcer of that police department testified that the strategy of withholding Miranda warnings until after interrogating and drawing out a confession was promoted not only by his own department, but by a national police training organization and other departments in which he had worked. App. 31–32. Consistently with the ofﬁcer's testimony, the Police Law Institute, for example, instructs that "ofﬁcers may conduct a two stage interrogation At any point during the pre-Miranda