Supreme Court overturns major Michigan case

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned a landmark 1986 ruling that forbid the police from questioning suspects without their attorney present. The 1986 case, Michigan v Jackson, was overturned on Tuesday in a 5-4 ruling (PDF) in a similar case, Montejo v Louisiana. As we reported last month, the Obama administration had sided with the state of Louisiana in that case and argued for overturning the prior case.

Michigan v Jackson established the rule that if someone accused of a crime has an attorney or has requested the appointment of an attorney by the court, police may not question them without that attorney being present even if the accused agrees to waive the right to have their attorney present during that particular session of questioning. Under Jackson, any waiver of that right was presumed to be invalid because it was not made with the advice of counsel.

Justice Scalia, writing the majority opinion joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Thomas and Kennedy, said “the marginal benefits of Jackson (viz., the number of confessions obtained coercively that are suppressed by its bright-line rule and would otherwise have been admitted) are dwarfed by its substantial costs (viz., hindering “society’s compelling interest in finding, convicting, and punishing those who violate the law.” (citations omitted)

This provoked an angry response from the dissenting justices, led by Justice Stevens, who took the unusual step of reading his dissenting opinion aloud from the bench. The majority, he wrote, “flagrantly misrepresents” the issues of the case and has “overrule[d] Jackson to correct a ‘theoretical and doctrinal’ problem of its own imagining.” Such tough language is relatively rare in Supreme Court rulings, though not entirely unheard of.