PERILOUS EROSION OF MIRANDA

It is now such standard fare on television police shows that it's easy to
forget its realworld origins: "You have the right to remain silent. . . . "
The Miranda warning is not just a pro forma protection for obviously guilty
people who are arrested. It is also an important protectionput in place by a
Supreme Court decision more than 30 years agofor those who are wrongly
accused. Before that hallmark decision, backroom confessions could be
extracted under harsh squadroom lights by police officers who felt free to
use force to help the process along. Suspects could be deprived of sleep and
often of an attorney (if they knew to ask for one), isolated from family and
threatened with physical harm. Too often the result was a confession without
truth.

With its 1966 Miranda ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court intended to put an end
to these practices.

Unchecked, such coercion and intimidation make a mockery of constitutional
guarantees of a fair trial. The high court required police to immediately
warn suspects that they have a right not to incriminate themselves, that a
lawyer will represent them and that the government can use in a trial any
statement a suspect makes.

But the nowclassic Miranda warning is at risk of being better enforced in
television dramas than in police work. A sorry federal appeals court
decision Tuesday from Virginia could accelerate that trend.

Miranda has never been absolute; three years after that decision the Supreme
Court created a limited "public safety" exception, allowing an officer, for
example, to first ask a suspect the whereabouts of his gun and then advise
him of his rights. In 1968 Congress attempted to define when a confession
can be considered voluntary and is thus admissible. More recently, a string
of state and federal court decisions has begun to shred the original ruling.
Last year, the California Supreme Court allowed police officers to continue
questioning a suspect who had asked for a lawyer after a Miranda warning;
the ruling permitted statements gathered this way to impeach the suspect in
court.

Tuesday's ruling is even more dangerous.

Interpreting the 1968 federal statute on voluntary confessions, a threejudge
panel allowed in court a confession from a suspect before he had been read
his rights. Although Atty. Gen.

Janet Reno has called that law unconstitutional and the Justice Department
has declined to rely on it, the appeals court said the 1968 statute now
takes precedence over Miranda. The court groused that failure to invoke this
law has produced too many acquittals and "the nonprosecution of many
dangerous felons." "There is no excuse for this," the court wroteapparently
not even the Constitution.

The decision is likely to be appealed to the full circuit and then to the
Supreme Court, and for now it binds only five southeastern states. Still, it
should not stand.