In the United States, the Miranda warning is a type of notification customarily given by police to criminal suspects in police custody advising them of their right to silence and, in effect, protection from self-incrimination; that is, their right to refuse to answer questions or provide information to law enforcement or other officials. Named for the U.S. Supreme Court's 1966 decision Miranda v. Arizona, these rights are often referred to as Miranda rights. The purpose of such notification is to preserve the admissibility of their statements made during custodial interrogation in later criminal proceedings. The idea came from law professor Yale Kamisar, who subsequently was dubbed "the father of Miranda."
Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966), was a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that law enforcement in the United States must warn a person of their constitutional rights before interrogating them, or else the person's statements cannot be used as evidence at their trial. Specifically, the Court held that under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the government cannot use a person's statements made in response to an interrogation while in police custody as evidence at the person's criminal trial unless they can show that the person was informed of the right to consult with a lawyer before and during questioning, and of the right against self-incrimination before police questioning, and that the defendant not only understood these rights but also voluntarily waived them before answering questions.
The Office of Special Investigations (OSI) of the U.S Justice Department was created in 1979 to identify and expel, from the United States, those who assisted Nazis in persecuting "any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion." This involved gathering, verifying, and presenting in court eyewitness and documentary evidence of decades-old crimes. The evidence was incomplete and scattered around the world. Much of it was then in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain. Nonetheless, the OSI investigated 1,700 persons suspected of being involved in Nazi war crimes. Over 300 have been prosecuted with at least 100 stripped of their U.S. citizenship and 70 deported, the most recent in 2021. Others have left voluntarily, fled, or have been blocked from entering the United States. In the 1980s, at least seven men facing investigation or prosecution from the OSI committed suicide.
In the United States, the exclusionary rule is a legal rule, based on constitutional law, that prevents evidence collected or analyzed in violation of the defendant's constitutional rights from being used in a court of law. This may be considered an example of a prophylactic rule formulated by the judiciary in order to protect a constitutional right. The exclusionary rule may also, in some circumstances at least, be considered to follow directly from the constitutional language, such as the Fifth Amendment's command that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself" and that no person "shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."
United States v. Hubbell, 530 U.S. 27 (2000), was a United States Supreme Court case involving Webster Hubbell, who had been indicted on various tax-related charges, and mail and wire fraud charges, based on documents that the government had subpoenaed from him. The Fifth Amendment provides that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." The Supreme Court has, since 1976, applied the so-called "act-of-production doctrine". Under this doctrine, a person can invoke his Fifth Amendment rights against the production of documents only where the very act of producing the documents is incriminating in itself.
Garrity v. New Jersey, 385 U.S. 493 (1967), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that law enforcement officers and other public employees have the right to be free from compulsory self-incrimination. It gave birth to the Garrity warning, which is administered by investigators to suspects in internal and administrative investigations in a similar manner as the Miranda warning is administered to suspects in criminal investigations.
Frank Walus (1922-1994) was born in Germany of Polish parents and emigrated to the United States in 1963. He worked in a factory in the Chicago area and became a US citizen in 1970. In 1973 he was accused of having been a Nazi who beat and killed Jews in Poland during World War II. Prosecution was initiated by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in 1977. He was convicted based upon questionable testimony in a bench trial before a judge who appeared visibly hostile to the defense. An appeals court vacated the verdict and ordered a new trial before a different judge. By this time, the new Office of Special Investigations (OSI) had been established in the US Department of Justice. After conducting a lengthy and exhaustive investigation of witnesses and documents, OSI concluded that it "could not responsibly go forward with a new trial." OSI dropped the charges, expressed regret that they had ever been filed, and partially reimbursed Walus for his expenses.
Vladas Zajančkauskas was a Lithuanian Nazi collaborator during World War II and alleged war criminal. At age 95 he stood to become the oldest person ever deported as a result of an investigation by the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI).
The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution creates several constitutional rights, limiting governmental powers focusing on criminal procedures. It was ratified, along with nine other amendments, in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights.
The Hyde Amendment is a federal statute allowing federal courts to award attorneys' fees and court costs to criminal defendants "where the court finds that the position of the United States was 'vexatious, frivolous, or in bad faith'". In such cases, the federal court may allow victims to recover some of the costs they incurred in fighting the government's investigation and prosecution by authorizing an award of attorneys' fees and court costs to a criminal defendant when the prosecution's evidence is so baseless as to be "frivolous." Compensation awarded under this statute would come out of the budget of the specific federal agency involved, typically the United States Attorney's Office.
California v. Byers, 402 U.S. 424 (1971), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States decided that providing personal information at the scene of an accident does not infringe on one's Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.
Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court clarified the application of the Fourth Amendment's protection against warrantless searches and the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for searches that intrude into the human body. Until Schmerber, the Supreme Court had not yet clarified whether state police officers must procure a search warrant before taking blood samples from criminal suspects. Likewise, the Court had not yet clarified whether blood evidence taken against the wishes of a criminal suspect may be used against that suspect in the course of a criminal prosecution.
United States v. Wade, 388 U.S. 218 (1967), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that held that a criminal defendant has a Sixth Amendment right to counsel at a lineup held after indictment.
United States v. Valenzuela-Bernal, 458 U.S. 858 (1982), is a United States Supreme Court case that determined the constitutionality of deporting aliens who might give testimony in criminal alien smuggling prosecutions. Because deporting alien witnesses might take away a testimony that would be both “material and favorable” to the defendant, it gives rise to a potential motion from the defense to dismiss the indictment under the Compulsory Process Clause of the Sixth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Allan A. Ryan Jr. was an American attorney, author and a law professor at Harvard University, where he taught from 1985 until his death. He is best known for his work as a Justice Department lawyer who in the early 1980s identified and prosecuted dozens of Nazi collaborators living in the United States, earning him a reputation as America's foremost Nazi hunter.
Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760 (2003), was a decision of the United States Supreme Court, which held that a police officer does not deprive a suspect of constitutional rights by failing to issue a Miranda warning. However, the court held open the possibility that the right to substantive due process could be violated in certain egregious circumstances and remanded the case to the lower court to decide this issue on the case's facts.
Johann Breyer was a Czech-American tool and die maker and onetime SS-Totenkopfverbände concentration and death camp guard whom the United States Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations (OSI) unsuccessfully attempted to denaturalize and deport for his teenage service in the SS. His was considered the "most arcane and convoluted litigation in OSI history", owing to the convergence of three unusual legal factors in the case:
United States v. Armstrong, 517 U.S. 456 (1996), was a case heard by the Supreme Court of the United States in which the court held that the burden of proof for selective prosecution rests with the defendant, who must show the government declined to prosecute similarly situated suspects of other races.
Aleksandras Lileikis was the chief of the Lithuanian Security Police in Vilnius during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania and a perpetrator of the Holocaust in Lithuania. He signed documents handing at least 75 Jews in his control over to Ypatingasis būrys, a Lithuanian collaborationist death squad, and is suspected of responsibility in the murder of thousands of Lithuanian Jews. After the 1944 Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he fled to Germany as a displaced person. Refused permission to immigrate to the United States because of his Nazi past, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950s. In 1955, his second application for permission to immigrate was granted and he settled in Norwood, Massachusetts, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1976. Eli Rosenbaum, an investigator for the Office of Special Investigations, uncovered evidence of Lileikis' war crimes; proceedings for his denaturalization were opened in 1994 and concluded with Lileikis being stripped of his United States citizenship. He returned to Lithuania, where he was charged with genocide in February 1998. It was the first Nazi war crimes prosecution in the post-Soviet block of Europe. He died of a heart attack in 2000 before a verdict was reached.
Salinas v. Texas, 570 US 178 (2013), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which the court held 5-4 decision, declaring that the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause does not extend to defendants who simply choose to remain silent during questioning, even though no arrest has been made nor the Miranda rights read to a defendant.
