The Aftermath and Final Reflections

Hi listeners, exciting news. Crime House Plus and Murder trrue crrime stories are celebrating America's two hundred fiftieth by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America These are the crimes and cases that gave us miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement Follow murder trrue crrime stories for a new episode every Monday, leading up to july fourth, or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus d. com or if you're listening on Apple podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page Hy listeners, It's Vanessa. I'm excited to share a bonus episode with you this week. Murder True Crime Stories from Crime House is marking America's two hundred fiftieth fourour part Limited series called The Crimes That Built America. It's four major moments in crime in our history. The case behind Miranda rights, the crrimes that created the FBI The era that gave us criminal profiling and the murder of Adam Walsh that built America's missing children movement I have episode one for you right now, the case that gave us Miranda rights. Want the full series today? Join Crime House pllus to binge all four ad free, or follow murder true crime stories to hear a new episode free every Monday until july fourth. And as a Crime House Plus member, you'll also get every episode of Serial Killers and Murderous Minds early and ad free To join, go to crimehouseplus d. com or if you listen on Apple podcasts, tap tryry free at the top of this show's page This is Crime House You probably know the words by heart You have the right to remain silent anythingy you say can and will be used against you in a court of law You have the right to an attorney. They're on every cop show, every crime movie. They've been read aloud during every arrest in America for almost sixty years Or at least they're supposed to be They're called Miranda writes What you may not know is that Miranda rights are named after a real person. What he did to earn his place on that card In nineteen sixty three twenty two year old career criminal named Ernesto Miranda. kidnapped an eighteen year old woman named Patricia Weir off a sidewalk in Phoenix, Arizona and assaulted her in the desert He was caught confessed and sentenced to twenty to thirty years in prison Three years later The Supreme Court of the United States threw out his conviction because he was innocent because of how he'd been questioned case that bears his name change the rules for every police interrogation in America. years after that Ernesto Miranda was murdered in a bar fight in downtown Phoenix And the man who killed him, was the first person in American history protected by the law that Bore Miranda's name This is the story of the most famous sentence in American law where it came from paid for it. and the strange dark afterlife of the man who gave it his name People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle You don't always know which part you're on Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending I'm Carter Roy And this is murder. Cime Stories, a crime house original powered by Pave stududios New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look Tod We're starting a brand new four week series in honor of the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Founding of the United States It's called The Crimes that Built America course of four Mondays on the Murder True Cron Stories feed We're covering the cases that buildil the American criminal justice system as we know it for tragedies that led to greater protections for everyone Miranda writes the FBI Ciminal profiling the system that protects and advocates for missing children Each one exists because of a specific crime a specific family in a specific moment when the country decided Enough was enough Thank you for being part of the Cime House community Please rate, review, and follow the show If you're a Crimehouse Plus subscriber, all four episodes are available right now, completely ad free. If you haven't joined yet, go to crimehouseplus. com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories showow page on Apple Podcasts You'll get part one and part two at the same time plus exclusive bonus content for our first episode of the Cimes that Built America I'm covering the case of Ernesto Miranda in nineteen sixty three Miranda was a twenty two year old dock loader in Phoenix, Arizona The long juvenile record. In that march, he kidnapped and attacked an eighteen year old woman who was walking home from work He was arrested interrogated And confess What happened next would change the criminal justice system forever and give us constitutional protections known as Miranda writes all that more So you know the uneasy anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company? Well, there's actually a term for that. It's called insoranoia And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders likeike providing dedicated reps whose priority is you. And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insuranoyia with NjM inssurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today Phoenix in the early nineteen sixties was a fast growing desert city of about four hundred thousand people And it was segregated north to south by Van Buren Street White families live north of it Mexican American families live south And the line between them was almost never crossed Downtown was where everyone met It had the shops, the diners, the buses, the movie theaters. the biggest theater in the city was The Paramount on East Washington Street in March of nineteen sixty three kill a mockingbird had been on the Marquee for weeks When the last show let out at eleven PM The ushers and concession girls would clean up the lobby and catch the bus home. One of them was an eighteen year old named Patricia Weir Who everyone called Chrish Trish was the second of four daughters, born in Phoenix in nineteen forty five She was quiet and shy kind of girl who said yes, ma'am, and no ma'am, because that was how her mother had raised her. She wore her hair short dressed conservatively and was saving every paycheck from the paramount for secretarial school herer father, Merril Weir had worked as a custodian at the Goodyear Aircraft pllant outside Phoenix He died in nineteen sixty one when Trish was sixteen. Tish, who'd always been close to him became even more reserved Her mother, Zayola started taking on extra work to keep up with the bills. Her older sister, Anne had recently married and she and her new husband had moved into the family home to help with the rent. The house was on the north side of Phoenix in a developing area three blocks from the bus stop at seeventh Street and Marlette Avenue empty lots, new construction families with kids to get home from work Trish walked two blocks south from the Paramount to seventh Street caught the northbound bus, rode for about fifteen minutes. got off at Marlette and walked the last three blocks home She'd done it five nights a week for months On the night of Saturday, march second, nineteen sixty three, she got off her shift around eleven thirty PM She walked her usual route to the bus stop with a coworker Before midnight, the bus pulled up at seventh in Marlette and Trish stepped off The neighborhood was still under construction. The sidewalks were dark and quiet She started walking the three blocks toward home That's when she heard a car behind her le slow few seconds later. It stop The driver's door opened and the man got out and started walking up the sidewalk after her Chrish kept walking. The man gotught up to her and grabbed her around the waist from behind. He said, If you don't scream, I won't hurt you was a lie dragged her to the car and pushed her into the back seat tied her ankles together and her wrists behind her back He told her to stay quiet For about twenty minutes, he drove north out of the city and into the desert He pulled off the road Then he raped her in the back seat the four dollars from her purse and drove back toward town He let her out of the car. about four blocks from her house He told her Pay for him Then he drove away Trish walked the four blocks home in shock By the time she got there, her hands were still shaking and her wrists were still raw from the rope Her sister, Anne was waiting Tatricia said she'd be home by midnight When Trish told her what had happened and didn't ask questions, she just picked up the phone and called the police By the time the officers arrived Trish was sitting at the kitchen table, barely able to speak Clothes were torn The rope marks on her wrists hadn't faded Her mom was awake by then. And she begged Trish not to file a report. Zeola was a depression era woman who'd been raised to believe that sexual assault was something a young woman never recovered from wouldn't want to hire her. that no man would want to marry her. Fish made the report anyway. The officers took her to Good Samaritan Hospital, a few miles north of downtown A doctor examined her and confirmed that she had been assaulted Trish gave her a statement to a twenty seven year old detective named Carol Cooley who'd been with Phoenix BD for five years She described her attacker About twenty five years old Mexican or maybe Italian around five foot eleven slim build short curly black hair Rimmed glasses. And she described his car a faded green older model sedan Thd piece of rope hanging across the back of the front seat she'd been able to see when she was tied up behind it Couie wrote it all down and told Trish he'd be in touch for the next week Nothing happened ish stayed home for a few days. By midwek, she decided to go back to work. Anne's husband drove her to the paramount in the evenings and waited at the bus stop to pick her up at the end of her shift between the drop off and the pickup He'd cruised the neighborhood looking for the car Trish had described to him onn the night of march tenth, eight days after Trish was attacked He found it He was waiting at the bus stop when a faded green sedan turned onto Marlette Avenue and disappeared into the dark Par matched Trisha's description exactly He didn't catch the full license plate, but he got most of it three letters in a few digits He went to the Phoenix PD the next morning and gave them to Coolie. On march eleventh, nineteen sixty three, Detective Cooley went to the Arizona Motor Vehicle Division pold records on every packard with plates matching the partial Trish's brother in law had given them He got a hits on a nineteen fifty three packard owned by a Mesa housewife named Twila Hoffman plate was one digit off from the partial. rish's brother in law had misread it in the dark. The next day, march twelfth Cooley and his partner, a detective named Wilfred Young, drove out to the Hoffman address in Mesa house was vacant The neighbors told them the people who'd lived there had moved a few days earlier. taking their things in a truck marked United prodrouce Julie and Young got in touch with the company and learned that Twyila's common law husband A man named Ernesto Miranda worked there He'd just moved his family to a new address in Phoenix According to the MEA Police He had quite a juvenile record. from there. pieces came together Ernesto had been born in Mesa on march ninth, nineteen forty one. His father was a house painter who'd immigrated from Mexico His mother had died when Ernesto was six. His father had remarried not long after. Ernesto, who went by Ernie as a kid never got along with his stepmother By eighth grade, he was already in trouble His first felony conviction of burglary, came at fourteen And the next year, he was sent to the Arizona State Industrial School for Boys, the State Reform School He was released, sent back and released again at seventeen He moved to Los Angeles, where he was arrested on suspicion of armed robbery and what police described as a sex offense He spent two and a half years in custody Eventually, he was released and sent back to Arizona where he enlisted in the army W. Miranda spent six months of his fifteen month enlistment in military jail at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He was locked up for repeatedly going AWall and for what the army described as peeping tom offenses They ordered him into psychiatric counseling. And he only went to one session In nineteen fifty nine, the army gave up on him He was discharged was no work No plan and no place to go Miranda drifted east He was jailed for vagrancy in Texas arrested in Nashville for driving a stolen car and served a year in a federal prison in California for taking it across state lines When he was released in nineteen sixty one He stayed in California. where he met a twenty nine year old separated mother of two named Twila Hoffman And they started living together and under California law Their relationship counted as a common law marriage They moved back to Arizona and by nineteen sixty two. they had a daughter of their own Miranda found work as a night shift dock loader at United Produce. Coworkers liked him boss called him a hard worker T anyone who saw him during the day Miranda was a quiet young father with a steady job and a baby on his hip But Phoenix PD already had a thick file on him multiple women in his neighborhood had reported being followed, grabbed and propositioned He matched the description in several of the cases None of the charges had ever stuck. Whatever Twyila might have known about Miranda's record from before they met, she didn't know about the local file or what he'd done to Trish detectives Cooley and Young did closing in onn march thirteenth. They drove to the new address on West Mariposa Avenue in Phoenix faded green nineteen fifty three Packard was sitting in the driveway, plate matching Twila's NVD record through the open back window. Clely could see a piece of rope running across the back of the front seat. Pyila answered the door. The detectives asked if Ernesta was home. She said he was asleep to waken A few minutes later Miranda came out fully dressed The detectives asked him to come with them to the station for questioning He didn't ask why. He didn't ask for a lawyer. He didn't ask if he had to He just said, yes and gotten the If's the business idea you've been putting off because it feels too complicated, Shopify is the ultimate excuse killer designed to help you start your business with every necessary tool ready on day one. Taking the leap is a big deal, but Shopify makes it incredibly simple. You can easily bring your brand's unique style to life using their beautiful templates and AI tools to launch a gorgeous site with zero coding experience You also get the ultimate peace of mind knowing that Shopify Checkout is already optimized for maximum sales, making it seamless for returning customers to buy in a single click. 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That's shopify d. com slash pave shhopify d. com slash pave On the morning of march thirteenth, nineteen sixty three Phoenix police brought twenty two year old Ernesto Miranda to their downtown headquarters on F Avenue Detectives Coolley and Young led him to a small room and asked him to wait while they prepared a lineup Three other men were brought in alongside Miranda All Hispanic All roughly the same height and build all wearing the same prison issue clothing then they went and got Trish Weir She stood behind a one way window with Cooie He asked her if she recognized any of the men as her attacker She wasn't sure The man who had attacked her had been wearing dark rimmed glasses. None of these men were and it had been nighttime in the desert She told Koolly that the man in position number one looks similar to her attacker But she couldn't say for sure. man in position number one was Ernesto Miranda. Coolie took Trish out of the room Then he walked back into the interrogation room where Mirando was waiting Miranda asked How did I do Cley looked at him and said Not good wasasn't Trish hadn't actually identified anyone. She just said she thought Miranda may have been her attacker But he didn't know that And even before the lineup Culian Young had already decided to say Trish had picked him out They also weren't going to tell him he had the right to remain silent They weren't going to tell him. he had the right to a lawyer They weren't going to read him any rights at all Because in march of nineteen sixty three, anywhere in America, the police were not required to. For the next two hours, Cooooly and young questioned Miranda alone The room had no windows. Miranda hadn't slept since the previous afternoon. before his night shift at United Produce He had no food The water No lawyer. ers kept asking He kept denying than two hours in fest He confessed to everything notot just the rape of Patricia Weir on march second eight other crimes over the past two years. including a robbery and an attempted rape He wrote it all down, then Cooley gave him a Phoenix PD form to copy his statement onto The form had a pre printed paragraph across the top It read I do hereby swear that I make this statement voluntarily and of my own free will with no threats, coercion or promises of immunity. and with full knowledge of my legal rights Understanding any statement I make may be used against me Miranda signed it He had no idea thoseose legal rights were Then Coulely left the room and brought Trish back in She'd spent the past hour and a half waiting in an office down the hall trying Cry Coolie was walking her into a room where her attacker was sitting in a chair across a table. pointed at Miranda and asked Is this the man Trish would later say it was the worst moment of the entire ordeal being in the same room with him being looked at by him She didn't answer right away Coooolley turned to Miranda Is this the girl Miranda looked up at her That's the girl He said What had just happened in that room would never happen today called a show up. And modern eyewitness identification research has shown it is one of the least reliable methods of identification practiced Eespecially after a confession when every police ceue pushes the witness toward the answer they want. In nineteen sixty seven, the Supreme Court ruled in two separate cases that this kind of identification was unconstitutionally suggestive Bringing a witness face to face with a single suspect inside a police station and asking, is this the person was no longer allowed in nineteen sixty three It was standard It's hard to overstate in twenty twenty six, what a police interrogation back then actually looked like And the Supreme Court had outlawed confessions extracted by torture in nineteen thirty six. The ruling came after Mississippi police had hung a black suspect from a tree beaten two others until they confessed But everything short of physical torture was still on the table sleep deprivation bright lights, lying about evidence tellelling the suspect that their family would suffer if they didn't talk, telling them they had already been identified The two hours Cooley and Young spent with Miranda were the gentler version of all this. They didn't beat him or threaten him they just lied to him. And because he didn't know his rights, that confession came out the other side On march fourteenth, Miranda was charged with first degree rape and kidnapping He was held in the Maricopa County jail The trial was set for mid June The court appointed Miranda, an attorney. A seventy three year old phoenix lawyer named Alvin Moore with forty years of criminal defense experience. Moore visited Miranda in jail, listened to his account of the interrogation and decided to fight the confession. Moore's argument was specific Because Miranda wasn't told he had the right to refuse, to remain silent or to ask for a lawyer, his confession in voluntary The trial began on june twentieth, nineteen sixty three before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Yale Mcphate Moore filed a motion to suppress the confession McFate overruled him And the confession went to the jury Trish testified, walking the jury through what had happened to her on the night of march second Couleie and Young testified about the interrogation The signed confession was read aloud The jury deliberated for five hours On june twenty seventh convicted Miranda on both counts of rape and kidnapping McFeate sentenced him to twenty to thirty years on each charge to run concurrently Miranda was transferred to the Arizona State prison at Florence, about sixty miles southeast of Phoenix. M appealed. the Arizona Supreme Court rejected the appeal ruling that Miranda's constitutional rights had not been violated because he hadn't specifically asked for a lawyer In June of nineteen sixty five. two years into his sentence Miranda decided to take his case higher. from his cell at Florence He handwrote a petition to the United States Supreme Court asking for a review of his case It was rejected been the end of the story But it wasn't because of a thirty five year old attorney named Robert Corcorin Corkin ran the Phoenix brranch of the American Civil Liberties Union The ACLU had been waiting for almost two years for the right case to take to the Supreme Court. to challenge the way police interrogations were conducted in America A previous test case called Escobedo vvers. Illinois, had been decided in nineteen sixty four In Escobedo, the Supreme Court had ruled that a suspect named Danny Escobado had been entitled to a lawyer during his interrogation because he had specifically asked for one pololice had refused The ruling was narrow. and lower courts couldn't agree on how to apply it some required warnings up front Others said it only kicked in when the suspect asked By nineteen sixty five More than one hundred and fifty cases challenging police interrogations under Escobedo were pending in courts around the country. The Supreme Court needed a clean case with a clear set of facts come back and settle what Escobado had meant Cororin had been reading the Arizona Supreme Court's ruling in Miranda's appeal thought he'd found it He wrote to Miranda's lawyer, Alvin Moore. Moore said he was too sick to keep going Corkorin who've never argued a case at the Supreme Court level picked up the phone and called the best criminal defense attorney in Phoenix His name was John J. Flynn He was forty one years old partner at Lewis and Roka on one of the largest firms in Arizona agreed to take the case pro bono Th thenen he asked his partner, John P. Frank, to help. was a constitutional law specialist who had clerked for Justice Hugo Black on the Supreme Court itself together with two associates He and Flynn wrote a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case November of nineteen sixty five, Court agreed Ernesto Miranda didn't know it yet, but his case was going all the way to Washington, DC His name would become synonymous with one of the most well known legal terms in America suffering from dry, tired, irritated eyes. Don't let dry eyes win. Use Sustain Pro. It hydrates, restores, and protects dry eyes for up to twelve hours Sustain Pro tririple action dry eye relief So you know that uneasy anxious feeling you get when you think about dealing with your insurance company Well, there's actually a term for that. It's called inureinoia And if that sounds like something you're way too familiar with, you should really think about getting NJM insurance They go to great lengths to do what's best for their policyholders likeike providing dedicated reps whose priority is you. And that means you'll find more peace of mind with them Relieve your insuran nooyia with NjM insurance by visiting njM. com for a quote today The Supreme Court that received Miranda versus Arizona in nineteen sixty six was one of the most ambitious courts in American history. Justice Earl Warren had taken over in nineteen fifty three Under his leadership. Courts spent the next decade rewriting American constitutional law. in nineteen fifty four outlawed school segregation in Brown V. Board of Education and in nineteen sixty three. They gave every felony defendant a right to a lawyer in Gideon v. Wainwright Miranda's case was the next. bundled it with three others, they all involved suspects who'd confessed in police interrogations without being told they had the right to remain silent. Oral arguments began on february twenty eighth, nineteen sixty six John Flynn, the Phoenix defense attorney Corcoran had recruited argued first His argument was about the Fifth Amendment, the part of the Constitution that protects people from being forced to testify against themselves Flynn argued that a police confession was a kind of testimony. And a confession given by a man who hadn't been told he could refuse to give it wasn't really voluntary It was coerced. the state of Arizona argued the opposite Their lawyer warned the justices that reading suspects their rights would seriously obstruct public safety He said criminals would simply ask for lawyers and refuse to talk the number of confessions would crash. cases would go unsolved Because one of the bundled cases was federal, The United States weighed into Its lawyer was Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall who had argued Brown V Board of Education twelve years earlier. Now, on behalf of the Johnson administration, he sided with Arizona Marshall said the government simply couldn't afford to appoint a lawyer for every poor person who was accused of a crime Oral arguments wrapped up the next day. The decision came down on june thirteenth, nineteen sixty six. By a vote of five to four The Supreme Court ruled in Miranda's favor Justice Earl Warren wrote the sixty page majority opinion It said that police interrogation was coercive by nature. A locked room armed officer a suspect alone, often without sleep. often confused about what was happening. Warren wrote that the Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination was useless to a suspect who didn't know they had it especially in that environment So police would have to spell it out before any questioning began Th he laid out for the first time in American history police were required to say A person in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed that he has the right to remain silent. and that anything he says will be used against him in court He must be clearly informed that he has the right to consult with a lawyer and to have the lawyer with him during interrogation and that if he is indigent, a lawyer will be appointed to represent him became known as the Miranda wararning Within a year, every police department in America had printed a version of it on a small laminated card. the size of a baseball card officers were required to carry by the late nineteen sixties And the warning had been recited so many times on television that millions of Americans could repeat it from memory Brnesto Miranda heard the decision read on a radio in the prison library at Florence He had won But he wasn't free the decision overturned his conviction, but Arizona was still allowed to retry him The retrial began in february nineteen sixty seven It had been delayed so that Trish, now twenty one and married could give birth to her first child before testifying this time, the prosecution didn't have a confession. did have Twila Hoffman She and Miranda had separated since his first trial and we're now in a custody battle over their daughter who was around five years old Under Arizona law, Miranda was still the child's legal father Quila wanted that to change. So she went to the prosecution with a story Shortly after Miranda's arrest in nineteen sixty three She visited him in jail confessed the crime to her And whether her testimony was true or motivated by the custody fight is something Miranda's defenders would argue about for the rest of his life. the jury believed her They deliberated for less than an hour and a half and on march first, nineteen sixty seven Miranda was convicted again. The judge handed him the same sentence twenty to thirty years Miranda came up for parole four times between nineteen sixty seven and nineteen seventy two He was denied every time On his fifth application in December of nineteen seventy two The Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles granted it He walked out of Arizona State prison on december eighteenth, nineteen seventy two He was thirty one years old. He moved back to the Phoenix neighborhood he'd grown up around. an area downtown known as the Duce It was a skid row of single room occupancy hotels Taverns, pool halls and day labor agencies He worked occasionally as a delivery driver. spent most of his time at the bars He also made a small business out of his own name And by nineteen seventy three Phoen police officers were carrying Miranda warning cards in their breast pockets Miranda figured out that if he showed up at the Maricopa County courthouse and the police station Officers and lawyers would pay him a dollar or two to sign one He'd write Arnesto Miranda underneath the words you have the right to remain silent We started doing it daily. He'd make for five dollars. It's spend most of it at the bar He still couldn't stay out of trouble. By nineteen seventy five, the arrests were piling up driving without a license. Possession of a firearm by a felon. the firearm charge was dropped, but it had violated his parole back to Arizona State prison for another year and was paroled again in late nineteen seventy five Two months later, he went back to the Duce And on the afternoon of january thirty first, nineteen seventy six, He walked into a bar called La Aapola sat down to play poker with two other men both Mexican nationals visiting Phoenix without papers The game ran for a couple of hours. There was money on the table. Somewhere around six PM, one of the other players accused Miranda of cheating The argument turned into a fist fight. Miranda beat up both men then walked back to the bar's bathroom to wash the blood off his hands While he was in there, the two men talked. acccording to a bartender who watched the whole thing One of the men later identified as twenty four year old Fernando Samoro Rodriguez handed a knife to the other man Rodriguez told the other man to quote Finish it with this Then he walked out the back door of the bar When Miranda came out of the bathroom The second man was waiting for him He was twenty three year old Aszquio Moreno Perez Stab Miranda once in the chest and once in the abdomen, then Ran Miranda was taken by ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital. the same hospital where Trish Weir had been examined He was pronounced dead on arrival The Phoenix police officer who searched his body found several signed Miranda warning cards in his wallet. Perez didn't make it far. An eyewitness had seen him stab Miranda Phoenix Speedy picked him up that night and brought him to the same downtown station where thirteen years earlier Carol Cooley and Wilfred Young had interrogated Ernesto Miranda this time The arresting officer pulled out A small wom He read You have the right to remain silent Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law the right to an attorney If you cannot afford an attorney, One will be provided for you. Perez exercised those rights. He refused without a confession and with only one eyewitness The Maricopa County atttorney's offffice decided they didn't have enough to charge him Phoenix PD released him within hours by the next morning get checked out of the downtown hotel where he was staying. And was on his way to Mexico Ultimately, he was formally charged with murder in absentia. on february fourth, nineteen seventy six He has never been located Fernando Samoro Rodriguez, the man who handed Perez the knife, was picked up separately The countounty attorney's offffice decided there wasn't enough evidence to charge him with anything either He was turned over to immigration authorities and deported. Nobody was ever convicted of the murder of Ernesto Miranda The man who killed him was one of the first people in American history protected by the law that bore Miranda's name. Ernesto Miranda was buried in the Mesa City cemetery near his mother Tyla Hoffman raised her three children She remarried and lived quietly until her death in two thousand six By then, the Miranda warning had become the most quoted sentence in American law It's read aloud in some version every time an American is arrested It's recited on every cop show, in every legal drama, in every police procedural ever made for television Part of the American vernacular in a way that almost no other legal phrase ever has been but it hasn't gone unchallenged In nineteen sixty eight, Congress passed a law trying to override it. The law sat mostly unused for thirty two years two thousand. The Supreme Court struck it down in a seven to two decision written by Chief Justice William Renquist who had spent his entire career criticizing Miranda and ended up cementing it. The decision has been narrowed over the years Police can question a suspect briefly without warnings if there is an immediate public safety concern Police can keep questioning a suspect who hasn't clearly asked for a lawyer or refused to talk Core has held without a miranda warning What you say in a police interrogation generally can't be used against you and Here's where the police were wrong They had warned that Miranda would crash confession rates Studies done since nineteen sixty six have found Most suspects, even after being told they have the right to remain silent changed wasasn't whether people confessed It was whether what they said. be used Patricia, We', the eighteen year old who walked off a bus on the night of march second, nineteen sixty three. She spent the next fifty six years of her life under a pseudonym And Back then, Phoenix newspapers had agreed not to print her name She finished secretarial school married Charles Shumway and had a family. She lived as an anonymous woman whose private story was attached to one of the most famous legal decisions in American history In twenty nineteen A film producer named George Colber tracked her down and asked for her permission to tell her story. She gave it. She let her name be printed. in twenty twenty three, when the film called Miranda's Victim was released she gave interviews She even appeared in a cameo in the wedding scene of her own life story When asked why she had finally come forward She said it was because she wanted other women who had been through the same thing as her to know that they could survive it. that a life was still possible afterwards. justice even the imperfect kind worth fighting for There's an irony in this story that's hard to miss The man whose name is on the most famous protection in American criminal law was a violent, predatory man. He attacked an eighteen year old woman walking home from work on Saturday night He didn't deserve sympathy But the law that Paris his name wasn't written for sympathetic figures It was written everyveryone The warning read to the man who killed Ernesta Miranda is the same warning read to everyone taken into custody today For most of American history, that door was closed And you are alone