Unconstitutional soul search

Coulter, Ann

Supreme Court Begins to Rein in Miranda Ruling

On Christmas Eve, 1968, 10-year old Pamela Powers was at a YMCA in Des Moines, Iowa, with her family watching her brother's wrestling match. On her way to the bathroom, Pamela was abducted and murdered.

Two nights later, Dec. 26, 1968, the lead suspect, Robert Williams, was riding in a police car from Davenport, Iowa, back to Des Moines for his arraignment. Williams had been read his Miranda rights, and he had obtained a lawyer who was waiting for him in Des Moines. The police officers were instructed not to interrogate Williams during the 160mile drive back to Des Moines.

The officers did, however, chat with Williams. In an act of unparalleled genius, one of the officers said to Williams, these now-famous words: 'I want to give you something to think about while we're traveling down the road . . . Number one, I want you to observe the weather conditions, it's raining, it's sleeting, it's freezing, driving is very treacherous, visibility is poor, it's going to be dark early this evening.

"They are predicting several inches of snow for tonight, and I feel that you yourself are the only person that knows where this little girl's body is, that you yourself have only been there once, and if you get a snow on top of it you yourself may be unable to find it. And, since we will be going right past the area on the way Des Moines, I feel that we could stop and locate the body, that the parents of this little girl should be entitled to a Christian burial for the little girl who was snatched away from them on Christmas Eve and murdered.

"And I feel we should stop and locate it on the way in rather than waiting until morning and trying to come back out after a snow storm and possibly not being able to find it at all."

The policeman's words affected Williams. He led them to Pamela's body and, in so doing, handed law enforcement his own noose. This was more than a confession. Only the killer could know where he had buried Pamela's murdered body. But at least her parents would be able to give her-as the policeman had suggested-a "Christian burial."

Confessions Are Good

In one of the Supreme Court's most corrupt decisions ever, Williams' conviction was thrown out. Any statements he made in response to the so-called Christian burial speech were deemed obtained in violation of Williams's right to assistance of counsel.

As the Supreme Court said in its stupefyingly obvious prose, the policeman "proceeded to elicit incriminating statements from Williams. He] did not preface this effort by telling Williams that he had a right to the presence of a lawyer, and made no effort at all to ascertain whether Williams wished to relinquish that right."

This is the sort of logic that enrages normal humans. Admittedly, there are certain protections from the government the Constitution grants even child-murderers. Being protected from an appeal to one's soul is not among them.

Consider what is not at stake. There is no danger that a false confession was being tortured from a pathetic and eager-to-please suspect. He willingly led them to the body. Not only that, but an appeal to the conscience doesn't make an innocent man confess falsely. That is the pragmatic objection to beating confessions out of suspects: You'll end up with a lot of false confessions.

But it is more than that. Confessions are good. Not just for law enforcement, but good for child-murderers. Breaking down doors to search for evidence without a warrant at 3:00 a.m. is good for law enforcement. And if the evidence is there, police-state tactics will not lead to fal:ie positives. But people tend not to like that sort of thing, and the Constitution says the government can't do it.

But confessions, especially confessions induced. by an appeal to the conscience, are a positive good for the suspect himself.

Only through the brilliant police work of the Iowa detectives were any remaining shreds of humanity in this child-- murderer awakened. And in what must have been one of the rare acts of nobility in his entire life, he took them to the body.

Foolish Warren Court

Though it wasn't the suspect's precious Miranda rights that got his conviction thrown out by the Supreme Court in Brewer v. Williams-it was his precious right to counsel-it was Miranda v. Arizona that got the ball rolling. That case still stands as the exemplar of foolish Warren Court rulings on criminal law.

Instead of protecting the innocent, and promoting a search for the truth, the Warren Court turned much of criminal law into a game of bells and whistles designed to ensure that criminal defense lawyers would win one for their guilty clients every once in a while.

Miranda seemed to do this by requiring a series of statements to a suspect before his confession would be deemed "voluntary," and thus, admissible. But the court allowed Congress to create alternative rules for determining that confession was voluntary, which Congress did in 1968.

This was far too subtle for federal district court judges, and now completely voluntary confessions are routinely thrown out for not being preceded by every scintilla of the Miranda warning.

But maybe not anymore. In an attempt to clarify the unless-otherwise-voluntary portion of the Miranda decision, Congress in 1968 enacted a law that explicitly provided for the admission of confessions that could be shown to have been voluntary using indicia other than the Miranda warning itself.

Despite the best efforts of the Clinton Department of Justice, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has recently acknowledged the existence of this law.

Amid the liberal caterwauling that has already begun, remember that the purpose of the 5th Amendment is to prevent involuntary confessions, not confessions that don't happen to follow a set speech invented on the spot by the Supreme Court roughly two centuries after the Constitution was adopted.

And though the main purpose of law enforcement is to lock up the guilty while protecting the innocent, it is not actually unconstitutional to save the souls of child-murderers such as Robert Williams in the process. Stay tuned.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Feb 26, 1999
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