Court Opinion

ID: 9646818
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 13:12:05.397754+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:11:42.180762
License: Public Domain

DONNELLY, Chief Justice,
concurring.
I concur in the principal opinion, but have an observation to make.
The United States Supreme Court, sitting as a Council of Revision, enacted the Miranda Rule as “federal organic law” in 1966. See R. Berger, Government by Judiciary 300-306 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1977); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966); and North Carolina v. Butler, 441 U.S. 369, 376, 99 S.Ct. 1755, 1759, 60 L.Ed.2d 286 (1979).
In my view, the Rule should now be repealed by the Court in order to place more value on a concern for victims as a component in the social equation. See R. Pound, Criminal Justice in America 10, 11 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1945). To borrow from Sidney Hook:
“We wish to reduce the role of violence in human affairs without sacrificing the principles of justice. The extension of the privileges against self-incrimination to absurd lengths by justices who abandoned common sense in a desire to establish a reputation for liberalism has no parallel in any other national legal jurisdiction. To elicit relevant testimony it has required legislation that has enabled some criminal defendants to purchase an undeserved immunity from punishment for very serious crimes. The statistics of violent crimes show that our situation is much too serious to indulge in sentimentalism at the expense of our fellow citizens. When crimes of violence are rare and infrequent we may justifiably lean over backward to protect those accused of serious crime from a possible miscarriage of justice. But it is not justice but only compassion that leads us to say that it is better that nine or ninety-nine guilty men escape punishment for their crime than that one innocent man be convicted. For that is certainly not doing justice either to the nine or ninety-nine guilty or to their potential victims. When crime is as rampant as it is today, those who invoke this dictum to justify strengthening the rights of the individuals accused of violent crime at the expense of the rights of the potential victims of violent crimes are not even entitled to the self-righteous claim that they are moved by compassion. Compassion, if it is a virtue, must itself be balanced and equitable. Where, we ask, is their compassion for the myriad victims of violent crime? At what point, we ask, do the victims come into the ethical reckoning?” S. Hook, Philosophy and Public Policy 135, 136 (Carbondale & Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).