I don't know how this post slipped away from me. Perhaps it was just a busy time of the semester. Such time periods do tend to arise.

Anyhow, I love the Dirty Harry movies, even The Dead Pool. Truth be told, Sudden Impact is by far my least favorite, despite its introduction of what is arguably Harry's most famous catch-phrase.

However, one of my long-time favorite exchanges came in the original:
District Attorney Rothko: Where the hell does it say that you've got a right to kick down doors, torture suspects, deny medical attention and legal counsel? Where have you been? Does Escobedo ring a bell? Miranda? I mean, you must have heard of the Fourth Amendment. What I'm saying is that man had rights.
Harry Callahan: Well, I'm all broken up over that man's rights!

Of course, most people know about the reading of our rights that Miranda has wrought; as a long-time watcher of "Cops", I've seen the readings in action. What I didn't know was how they came about, and I didn't really know what Escobedo had to do with anything. In Criminal Procedure this past semester, I finally found out. It was exciting.

Miranda, as it happens, has provided us with a wonderfully complex series of decisions. As the (Rehnquist) Court repeatedly emphasized, Miranda is a prophylactic. The Miranda warnings themselves are not Constitutional requirements. Instead, the Court requires their reading to protect Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights. That is to say, failure to read Miranda warnings itself isn't a violation of a Constitutional right; however, such a failure will make it very difficult for the state to use a confession or other evidence gained from a custodial interrogation.

And Escobedo? Well, Escobedo really just laid the groundwork for Miranda, as part of a series of cases showing police abuse of power.

What brought on writing this? For the second time in as many weeks, posts at BMWSportTouring.com have brought up the notion of random police stops of motorcycles, and there's a constant refrain that "if you haven't done anything wrong, why worry about the police performing a stop?" In this most recent stop, it sounds as if it's a Constitutional checkpoint stop, a la Prouse. But in the first one we heard about, an open-road stop to check documentation, it sounded much more questionable. And my point? The reason we constrain police is because when we haven't in the past, they've betrayed our trust.