l rights movement and emerging concepts of due process. The United States Supreme Court arguably was the most effective instrument of police reform" (p. 361). Democrats were in the majority in Congress and occupied the White House until 1968. Their domestic agenda focused primarily on rectifying through federal action racial discrimination and alleviating political and economic inequality of opportunity and poverty. Baker (1983) said "the Warren Court had been produced by social and political revolution: the postwar acceleration in man's continuing quest for . . . a new and heightened egalitarianism that recognized the victims of racial justice, the disenfranchised voter, the poor and ignorant among criminal defendants" (p. 287).
The Court's early 1960s decisions which, for example, made constitutionally inadmissible evidence gathered by police by unreasonable searches and seizures banned by the Fourth Amendment (Mapp v. Ohio 1961) and which interpreted the Sixth Amendment to require that the states provide at its expense counsel for indigent defendants in felony trials (Gideon v. Wainwright 1963), were supported by a majority of justices on the Court. Most of them had been appointed by Democratic Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and John Kennedy.
There then followed two five to four decisions which invaded an area where law enforcement had largely been exempt from judicial review, namely, "the interrogation room . . . the undisputed-and isolated-territory of the police, with no attorneys present, no witnesses, no tape recorders" (Baker, 1983, p. 13). The first case was Escobedo v. Illinois (1964) which extended the right to counsel up to the point of arrest. Justice Arthur Goldberg, a Lyndon Johnson appointee, provided the needed majority. The second was Miranda. Escobedo in particular stirred the wrath of the right. Los Angeles Police Commissioner William Parker said in 1964 that that holding would "handcuff the po...