Miranda, Please Report to the Principal's Office

[N]either the Fourteenth Amendment nor the Bill of Rights is for adults alone. (1) The age of an alleged criminal offender undoubtedly affects his or her ability to appreciate the consequences of confessing to criminal behavior. Courts have long accepted that youth and inexperience impact an individual's ability to make a voluntary confession. (2) Accordingly, this Article addresses whether Miranda v. Arizona--the seminal Fifth Amendment decision providing procedural rights to those enduring custodial interrogation (3)--should apply to students interrogated by school officials during school hours. (4) To answer this difficult question, this Article first provides a brief overview of the law of minors and confessions. Next, it considers the increasing law enforcement presence on our school campuses and evaluates how this presence affects the role of school officials. Finally, the high level of cooperation between law enforcement and school officials in criminal law enforcement is considered to determine whether Miranda should apply in the principal's office. (5) A. MIRANDA'S APPLICABILITY TO JUVENILES The prosecution may not use statements, whether exculpatory or inculpatory, stemming from custodial interrogation of the defendant unless it demonstrates the use of procedural safeguards effective to secure the privilege against self-incrimination. By custodial interrogation, we mean questioning initiated by law enforcement officers after a person has been taken into custody or otherwise deprived of his freedom in any significant way. (6) On at least five occasions, the United States Supreme Court has considered cases involving minors and confessions. (7) The Court's jurisprudence can be easily categorized into two main areas: cases involving Due Process or voluntariness challenges to confessions, and cases addressing purported Miranda violations in obtaining confessions. In both contexts, however, the Court has clearly indicated that there exists a distinction between minors and their adult counterparts in evaluating whether the confession should be utilized in criminal proceedings. As the Court emphasized in Gault, "admissions and confessions of juveniles require special caution." (8) Lowers courts, also, have distinguished between youthful offenders and their more senior peers. (9) These same courts, however, have increasingly been willing to broach the germane issue of who should be evaluated when assessing the voluntariness and admissibility of a minor's confession. (10) Under Miranda and its progeny, the consideration has been strictly limited to law enforcement ofricers--usually police officers. But, with the increased police presence in both public and private schools, courts must now address the relationship between school resource officers (SROs) (those police officers that are regularly scheduled to work at schools in both a school disciplinary and law enforcement capacity) and the teachers and principals who work in conjunction with SROs to maintain safety, order, and discipline on campuses. Lower courts have addressed this sensitive and synergistic relationship in the New Jersey v. T.L.O. search and seizure context, (11) but have not been as forthcoming in the confession arena where students need greater protection, (12) Just two years ago, Justice Breyer resurrected the concept of in loco parentis as it relates to the intersection of school discipline and school law enforcement. (13) Generally, the transition in modern times has been to move away from the more liberal approach taken in Tinker v. Des Moines (14) and toward an increasingly restrictive notion of students' rights in the overlapping criminal law and school discipline context. (15) Students may retain their Fourth Amendment rights, though somewhat diluted, but their Fifth Amendment rights more readily fall victim to the dual capacity of school official as part teacher, part state actor. …