Miranda v. Arizona, a 1966 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, required that police officers inform a criminal suspect of his or her basic constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and the right to consult with an attorney, before the suspect may be questioned. Any incriminating statement made after arrest, but in the absence of such a warning, was inadmissible as evidence in a trial. Miranda has been called "certainly the most significant criminal law decision of the Warren era, if not in the entire history of the United States Supreme Court" (Lasser, 1988, p. 191).
It was also one of the most politically controversial decisions in the history of the Court. For conservatives, and indeed for many ordinary Americans, it served to gel the notion that the courts, and particularly the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, were excessively lenient on criminal suspects and excessively restrictive of the police. It was frequently argued that the Court had "handcuffed the police" (Hickok, 1991, p. 297). Two years later, Richard Nixon was elected President. One of his stated goals was to appoint judges that would be "strict constructionists" of the Constitution -- meaning, most of all, that they would interpret the Bill of Rights in a more narrow and restrictive manner as applied to deviant or unpopular behavior, and most especially as applied to the rights of criminal suspects and defendants. The nomination of conservative judges to the federal judiciary, and especially to the Supreme Court, has likewise been an explicit goal of the Reagan and Bush administrations. These administrations have shaped the federal judiciary for nineteen of the twenty-five years since the Miranda decision was handed down.
During that time, the Court has indeed moved steadily to the right, until by 1991 there were no truly liberal Justices left on the high bench, and the Chief Justice, Willi...