Supreme Court holds §1983 damages unavailable for Miranda violation

In Vega v. Tekoh, the United States Supreme Court considered whether a law enforcement officer’s failure to provide required Miranda warnings gives rise to a damages action under 42 U.S.C. §1983, which provides a federal cause of action for “the deprivation of any rights, privileges or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.” In a 6-3 decision with the majority opinion written by Justice Alito, the Court re-affirmed that the requirement that law enforcement provide a suspect in custody with the familiar Miranda warnings – that the suspect has the right to remain silent and the right to have an attorney present for questioning – is a prophylactic rule designed to protect the Fifth Amendment right against coerced confessions rather than a constitutional right in and of itself. Accordingly, the Court found that while Miranda violations give rise to suppression, the remedy of §1983 monetary damages is unavailable. Justice Kagan authored an opinion for the three dissenting justices arguing that Miranda is a constitutional right, even if not precisely co-extensive with the Fifth Amendment coerced confession protection.

Tekoh was a healthcare worker at a California hospital. He was accused of inappropriately touching the genitals of a female patient while on duty. Vega was the investigating officer in the case who interrogated Tekoh and obtained from him a written confession. For purposes of the appeal, the parties agreed that Tekoh was subjected to a custodial interrogation within the meaning of Miranda and that Vega failed to give the required warnings. Tekoh’s confession was introduced at his two criminal trials, the first of which resulted in a mistrial, and was acquitted by the jury. Tekoh sued Vega and other defendants under §1983.

After a first civil trial, the judge concluded he had improperly instructed the jury. Before the second trial, Tekoh requested that the jury be instructed to find a Fifth Amendment violation if it concluded that Vega failed to give required Miranda warnings. The district court declined to do so, and instead instructed the jury that the Fifth Amendment was violated only if Tekoh’s confession had been improperly coerced or compelled. The jury returned a verdict for Vega and Tekoh appealed to the Ninth Circuit, which reversed – holding that the use of an un-Mirandized statement against a criminal defendant in a criminal proceeding violates the Fifth Amendment and can therefore support a §1983 claim. Vega was denied en banc review in the Ninth Circuit and petitioned the United States Supreme Court for certiorari.

The dispute between the majority and dissenting opinions in the Supreme Court illustrates the unique constitutional status of the Miranda decision. As an initial matter, there is no textual basis in the Fifth Amendment for the requirement that law enforcement officers provide warnings to suspects in custody about their constitutional rights. What the Fifth Amendment prohibits by its own terms is only coerced self-incrimination. In Miranda, however, the Court determined that to vindicate this right, additional procedural protections should be required. These took the form of the now universally-recognized Miranda warnings which are read to suspects. As the majority opinion details, these warnings have repeatedly and consistently been referred to as “prophylactic rules,” and are not required under the Fifth Amendment. In other words, Miranda is more protective of Fifth Amendment interests than what the Fifth Amendment itself requires.

The majority buttresses this point by noting logical inconsistencies which cannot be reconciled if Miranda warnings are compelled by the Fifth Amendment. First, many un-Mirandized confessions are in fact voluntary, i.e. not coerced or compelled, and are nevertheless excluded from evidence. Several other anomalies suggest Miranda is not coextensive with the Fifth Amendment. For example, a statement obtained in violation of Miranda may be used to impeach a defendant at trial, where a true involuntary confession cannot. The fruits, meaning additional evidence obtained by law enforcement as a result of first wrongfully obtaining the defendant’s statement, of an un-Mirandized confession may be introduced against a defendant, but the fruits of an involuntary statement may not. A failure to give Miranda warnings may be excused by the need to address an ongoing public safety concern, where obtaining an involuntary statement is never excusable. These differences, the majority reasons, could not exist if Miranda were truly just a restatement of the Fifth Amendment’s protections. For this reason, the majority concludes that exclusion of un-Mirandized statements at trial is a complete and sufficient remedy and §1983 damages are unavailable.

The dissent counters with logical inconsistencies of its own. Critical to the dissent’s argument is the Court’s prior holding in Dickerson v. United States, which struck down a federal statute whose explicit purpose was to abrogate the Miranda decision. Dickerson held that Miranda was a constitutional “rule,” and a constitutional “decision,” that sets forth “concrete constitutional guidelines,” and establishes a constitutional “minimum.” In short, Dickerson used every formulation except the one which would have resolved Tekoh’s case definitively by stating that Miranda was a constitutional right. But how, Justice Kagan asks, could Miranda be anything other than a constitutional right if its holding cannot be abrogated by a federal statute, as in Dickerson? For that matter, under what authority could federal courts enforce the Miranda guarantee against state courts in habeas proceedings if not through the Fifth Amendment, incorporated against the states by the Fourteenth Amendment? The dissent would find that Miranda creates a constitutional right, even if it is not precisely synonymous with the Fifth Amendment, and that violation of that right gives rise to a §1983 cause of action.

The majority has its own answer, again drawing on Dickerson, to the question of how Miranda can be properly enforced against the states if not through the Fourteenth Amendment which illustrates the doctrinal strangeness of Miranda itself. In Dickerson, the court held that a judicially-created prophylactic rule designed to protect federal constitutional rights takes on the status of a Law of the United States and is therefore enforceable against the states under the Supremacy Clause. The majority describes this as a “bold and controversial claim of authority,” and cites numerous criticisms of that position in a footnote. In this sense Miranda, as interpreted first in Dickerson, and now Tekoh, is very unusual in constitutional law. It is a judge-made rule more protective than constitutionally required of an enumerated right, enforceable against the states by federal courts, impervious to legislative attempts to overrule it, and requiring suppression of evidence where violated, but not a damages action under §1983 because it is not a constitutional right.

The fact that, despite the foregoing, no member of the Court appears to have any appetite to overrule, or even seriously reconsider Miranda, is testament to how large it looms in the American consciousness. Many lay-people, if they know nothing else about constitutional law, know the substance of the warnings which police must read to suspects. Most of them, notwithstanding the Court’s repeated statements to the contrary, will continue to think of those warnings as “Miranda rights.”