NEW YORK, FEB 09 – Yale Kamisar, the American jurist whose writings were the basis of the “Miranda warning” for the protection of suspects in the hands of the police, has died in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the age of 92. “’You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you. You have the right to call a lawyer before the interrogation to stay with you if you wish “, is one of the most famous sentences of jurisprudence (but also of the stars and stripes detective stories) that every police officer for 66 years now must read to each arrested. Behind this sentence was the work of Kamisar, who was just 37 years old but in the mid-1960s, as the magazine “Time” testified, was already considered the foremost expert in criminal law in the United States. The opinion of the Supreme Court that instituted the warning was the then Chief Justice Earl Warren in an era of enlargement of civil rights and liberties, but the basis was the writings of Kamisar, writes the “Washington Post” today, and in particular a 1965 article in which the lawyer, born in the Bronx to a family who fled Hitler’s racial persecution, contrasted the attention with which the defendants were treated in court with the Wild West that reigned during interrogation by the police. “The court is a beautiful place where defense lawyers get excited and strut and prosecutors are beaten. But what happens before an accused reaches safety and enjoys the comfort of this real mansion? Here is the problem. Usually he first has to go through a much less pretentious building, a police station with bare closets and locked doors. ” Backed by this opinion, Warren had ruled that the Fifth Amendment’s right to remain silent to avoid self-incrimination was valid not only in court, but also in police custody. The landmark case “Miranda v Arizona” named after Ernesto Miranda, sentenced to 20 years in prison for a 1963 rape kidnapping in Phoenix, has since entered the lexicon: today it is said that suspects duly advised of their rights have been “Mirandized”. (HANDLE).
(HANDLE)
