Court Opinion

ID: 9641542
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 17:34:04.854591+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:38.230518
License: Public Domain

Moylan, J.,

concurring'.

I concur. I join unequivocally both in the result in this case and in all aspects of the majority opinion by Judge Melvin.
By way of concurrence, however, I offer these few additional comments in the desire to come to grips with the sincere, but unsettling, observations made by Judge Lowe in dissent. I share his anguish at what seems, sometimes, to happen to the language as it is used by courts. He chides the Law for not always meaning what it seems to be saying. I find his observations particularly unsettling because they reinforce an increasingly entertained feeling of my own that the language of the Law frequently fails utterly to communicate what is really happening. It would behoove us, I submit, to take a leaf from the book of the Realistic School of Jurisprudence, led by Karl Llewellyn of Columbia and Jerome Frank of the Second Circuit, which revolutionized in the 1930’s our thinking about the very process of Law. Their first commandment was to look beneath the surface of the words used by courts at what is really happening within courts and judges. Animated by that realistic approach, I note the following observations.
Judge Lowe reads the facts in this case to fall beneath the coverage of Miranda v. Arizona. I agree with Judge Melvin *664that the facts in this case are not covered by Miranda v. Arizona. Even assuming, however, that Judge. Lowe’s reading of the facts is correct (which I do not believe), I still could not agree with his legal conclusion. His logic, otherwise impeccable, proceeds, I believe, from a false premise.
The unspoken predicate for Judge Lowe’s analysis is that the spirit of Miranda r. Arizona is still alive and well on East Capitol Hill. It is my reading of both the case law and of the history of our times that the spirit of Miranda has been dead for a decade. Because of judicial procedural conservatism, Miranda, as a shriveled skeleton of itself, is not technically dead. It is still capable of controlling a situation squarely on all fours with its facts. As a vital juridical force, however, capable of even minor extension to other sets of facts, it was sapped of all vitality as long ago as the Presidential Election of 1968.
The law, in splendid isolation, simply cannot ignore what every realistic layman knows to be true. Leaving aside all value judgment and simply assessing the judicial-political realities of our times, Miranda v. Arizona came at the very crest of the Warren Court’s revolution of the constitutional-criminal process. More than any other case, Miranda became the public symbol of that revolution. It spawned countless state and federal proposals, both statutory and by way of proposed constitutional amendment, to dismantle much of the reform worked by the Warren Court. As Mr. Dooley observed a century ago, “The Supreme Court reads the election returns.” In significant measure, the election of 1968, for better or for worse, was a mandate to cut back on the Warren Court generally and on Miranda specifically. In the wake of that mandate, the Supreme Court was significantly restructured qualitatively as well as quantitatively.
Although the fiction of the law pretends otherwise, the Supreme Court is not a monolithic Rock of Ages but a fluid body, changing as its composition and the political complexion of that composition changes. It might well be that the Warren Court would have read the facts now before us as Judge Lowe reads them, but that is beside the point. I have no doubt that *665the Burger Court would read the facts before us as Judge Melvin and I read them. The hard reality is that the Burger Court, and not the Warren Court, today represents “the law of the land.”
Not once since 1968 has the Supreme Court reversed a conviction on the basis of Miranda nor even held Miranda to apply. Despite clear language in Miranda pointing the other way, Harris v. New York, 401 U. S. 222 (1971), held that Miranda did not apply to a confession offered in rebuttal for purposes of impeachment. Michigan v. Tucker, 417 U. S. 433 (1974) , denied Miranda even the dignity of being of “constitutional dimension,” as it held that a Miranda violation was not even enough to trigger analysis under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine. Oregon v. Hass, 420 U. S. 714 (1975) , like Harris v. New York, refused to apply Miranda to a rebuttal-impeachment situation, dealing with a case where a request for counsel under Miranda had been flatly ignored by the police. United States v. Mandujano, 425 U. S. 564 (1976) , refused to apply Miranda to interrogation before a grand jury. Oregon v. Mathiason, 429 U. S. 492 (1977), refused to apply Miranda to a case where a parolee-suspect voluntarily came to the police station and was there interrogated. In Brewer v. Williams, 430 U. S. 387 (1977), the Supreme Court, in reversing a conviction for what clearly could have been a Miranda violation, pointedly ignored the very existence of Miranda and based its decision on other grounds.
The unmistakable message I get from the Supreme Court was expressed by this Court in Bartram v. State, 33 Md. App. 115, 149:
“To give ‘the broadest possible reading’ to Miranda in any respect is simply not the current tenor of Supreme Court thinking. The constitutional interpretations of that Court are not immutable as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. It is to blink at reality for the law to pretend not to see what every literate layman knows — that Miranda v. Arizona is in definite disfavor with the strong majority of the *666present membership of the institution charged with interpreting the law of the land. Miranda has not been overruled and is not likely to be overruled. The disfavor is manifested by its being read and applied in a restrictive rather than an expansive manner.”
Even Judge Lowe’s reading of the facts must concede that the case before us is not absolutely controlled by a literal, four-square application of Miranda. There is some room for maneuvering. We may determine, guided by the prevailing spirit of the law of the land, whether to squirm slightly forward or inch slightly backward. To discern that prevailing spirit, it is not enough to read Miranda in a vacuum. We must set a weather eye for the larger tide to see whether the direction of movement is forward or backward. The trend is unmistakable. Its message is clear that Miranda, even as far as it goes, is in distinct disfavor and that it will not be extended by the Supreme Court by so much as a millimeter. This is the reason I perceive for giving Miranda a tightly restrictive reading in this case. If, on the other hand, Miranda. were riding a flood tide rather than an ebb tide, one might agree with Judge Lowe that a logical extension of its spirit would compel the result he urges. My reading of the history of our constitutional law for the last decade indicates that as of 1978, Miranda is a setting sun and not a rising sun. I am not unhappy with this state of affairs but even if I were, objectively I would still have to read the history of the decade in the same way.
I quite agree with Judge Lowe that a cleaner method of accomplishing this constitutional purpose would be frankly and candidly to overrule Miranda. That prerogative, however, lies in Washington and not in Annapolis.
Judge Lowe suggests as an alternative avenue for reaching the result he seeks a holding that the right to the assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment was violated. The Supreme Court has made it clear that an individual only becomes “the accused” for purposes of the attachment of the right to counsel as of the time of indictment. Kirby v. Illinois, 406 U. S. 682 (1972); Massiah v. United States, 377 U. S. 201 (1964).
*667I agree completely with Judge Melvin in his reading of the facts and the application of the law to those facts and, therefore, I vote to affirm. Even if, arguendo, I agreed with Judge Lowe’s reading of the facts, I would still vote to affirm because of my strong conviction that Miranda is now sapped of all vitality except in those cases squarely covered by it.