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Page Number: 24.0

4 

VEGA v. TEKOH 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

§2254(a).  Miranda checks both boxes.  The Court has “con-
sistently applied Miranda’s rule to prosecutions arising in 
state courts.”  Dickerson, 530 U. S., at 438.  And prisoners 
may claim Miranda violations in federal-court habeas pro-
ceedings.  See 530 U. S., at 439, n. 3; Thompson v. Keohane, 
516 U. S. 99, 107, n. 5 (1995).  So Dickerson is unequivocal: 
Miranda is set in constitutional stone. 

Miranda’s constitutional rule gives suspects a correlative 
“right[ ].”  §1983.  Under Miranda, a suspect typically has a 
right  to  be  tried  without  the  prosecutor  using  his  un-
Mirandized statement.  And we know how that right oper-
ates in the real world.  Suppose a defendant standing trial
was able to show the court that he gave an un-Mirandized 
confession  during  a  custodial  interrogation.    The  court 
would have no choice but to exclude it from the prosecutor’s 
case.  As one judge below put it: “Miranda indisputably cre-
ates individual legal rights that are judicially enforceable.
(Any prosecutor who doubts this can try to introduce an un-
Mirandized  confession  and  then  watch  what  happens.)” 
Tekoh v. County of Los Angeles, 997 F. 3d 1260, 1263 (CA9 
2021) (Miller, J., concurring in denial of rehearing en banc).
The  majority  basically  agrees  with  everything  I’ve  just 
explained. 
It  concurs  that,  per  Dickerson,  Miranda 
“adopted a ‘constitutional rule.’ ”  Ante, at 11 (quoting Dick-
erson, 530 U. S., at 439); see ante, at 12.  How could it not? 
That  Miranda  is  a  constitutional  rule  is  what  Dickerson 
said (and said and said).  The majority also agrees that Mi-
randa  “directed  that  statements  obtained  in  violation  of 
[its] rules may not be used by the prosecution in its case-in-
chief ”—which  is  simply  another  way  of  saying  that  Mi-
randa  grants  suspects  a  right  to  the  exclusion  of  those 
statements from the prosecutor’s case.  Ante, at 5. 

So how does the majority hold that a violation of Miranda 
is not a “deprivation of [a] right[ ]” “secured by the Consti-
tution”?  §1983.  How does it agree with my premises, but