On March 3, 1963, an 18-year-old girl was kidnapped and forcibly raped near Phoenix, Arizona. Ten days later, on the morning of March 13, 1963, Mr. Miranda was arrested and taken to the police station. At the time Miranda was 23 years old, indigent, and educated to the extent of completing half the ninth grade. He was diagnosed with an emotional illness of the schizophrenic type. The doctor's report also stated that Miranda was alert and oriented as to time, place and person, intelligent within normal limits, competent to stand trial and sane within the legal definition.
At the police station, the victim picked Miranda out of a line-up and two officers then took him into a separate room to interrogate him, starting about 11:30 a.m. First Miranda denied his guilt, but within a short time he gave a detailed oral confession and then wrote a brief statement admitting culpability and describing the crime. Miranda prepared the statement in his own hand and signed it. All this was accomplished in two hours or less without any force, threats or promises. It was also accomplished without any effective warnings. This seemingly standard interrogation and subsequent court decisions resulting there from sparked a landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The debate surrounding that U.S. Supreme Court decision is still being heard today.
Following Miranda's conviction, based largely upon his confession, he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 was heard by the Court along with three others, all raising the issue of admissibility into evidence of confessions obtained during police interrogations. The Court first discussed the nature of these interrogations and cited factual studies including the Wickersham Report to Congress disclosing widespread police violence and the "third degree" to obtain confessions. The Court then pointed to a series of cases it had decided wherein the police resorted to beatings, hangings, whippings and "sustained and protracted" questioning incommunicado in order to exhort confessions. Finally, as late as 1961 The Commission on Civil Rights found much evidence indicating the police still resorted to physical force to obtain confessions.
The Court moved on to state that it recognized in-custody interrogation was now more psychologically oriented than physical. It recognized coercion can come from the mental and that "the blood of the accused is not the only hallmark of an unconstitutional inquisition." That being the case, the "very fact of custodial interrogation exacts a heavy toll on individual liberty and trades on the weakness of individuals." It concluded that the Fifth Amendment privilege commanding that "no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, required the now famous warnings:
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