COURT TO REVISIT MIRANDA WARNING

The Supreme Court will re-examine the familiar legal warning beginning,
"You have the right to remain silent," to answer whether police always must
read suspects their rights before seizing drugs or other evidence they plan
to use at trial.

At issue is a potential loophole that arises when a suspect tells police
not to bother with the warning, or when a suspect owns up to a crime before
police have a chance to read all the "Miranda rights."

The court's eventual ruling also could address arrests in which an officer
fails to read the rights but a suspect talks anyway. This case will be
closely watched by prosecutors and law officers, Harrison County Assistant
District Attorney Charles Wood said.

"Miranda is very important and has been ever since it was decided," he
said. "It changed the way law enforcement did business at that time
drastically. The Supreme Court fine-tunes it through the years. There will
be a case almost every term, at least one case. Now, it's going down to
specific situations that, a lot of time, are very fact specific.

"We discuss those rulings with law enforcement. We and they want to make
sure they are doing it the way the Constitution says it is to be done and
the way the Supreme Court says it is to be done."

In this latest case before the Supreme Court, a lower court concluded that
if police find physical evidence it cannot be used when a suspect
volunteers information or tells officers not to bother with the warning.

The case is a follow-up to a major ruling three years ago in which the high
court underscored that police must warn suspects that they do not have to
cooperate or answer questions. That ruling reaffirmed the 1966 Miranda v.
Arizona decision that gave the warnings their name.

The Bush administration asked the high court to look at the case of a
Colorado man arrested in 2001 for violating a domestic restraining order.
Samuel Patane cut off a detective who started to read him his rights, and
then voluntarily directed police to a Glock pistol in his bedroom. Patane,
who had a felony record, was charged with illegal possession of a gun.

Patane's lawyer argued the lower court got it right, and there is no reason
for the Supreme Court to get involved.

Solicitor General Theodore Olson, the administration's top Supreme Court
lawyer, said officers should not be penalized for taking Patane at his word
that he already knew his rights, or in other cases where "warnings may be
omitted during a fast-moving investigation."

"The question whether Miranda requires exclusion not only of the suspect's
unwarned statement but also its tangible fruits thus arises with some
frequency," Olson wrote in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case.

Deanne Maynard, a Washington lawyer who wrote a friend of the court brief
for criminal defense lawyers in the 2000 police warnings case, said the
court has touched on the issue with earlier rulings but never squarely
ruled on it.

The case the court agreed to hear next fall partly turns on how lower
courts have applied earlier Supreme Court rulings. A federal appeals court
found that the 2000 ruling undermined two earlier decisions in which the
Supreme Court allowed evidence to be used at trial.

The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year that
the gun could not be used as evidence against Patane because it was the
tainted "fruit" of a statement made without a Miranda warning.

Olson said the lower court ruling threatens to hamstring prosecutors.

The high court should step in "because the suppression of probative
physical evidence in such cases imposes serious costs on the administration
of justice," Olson wrote.

In another case, the court agreed to take a fresh look at police rules for
searching stopped cars. The court agreed to hear an appeal from Arizona
involving the 1999 arrest of a man who had just parked his car in a driveway.

A search of Rodney Gant's car turned up cocaine and drug paraphernalia. A
state appeals court ruled that the evidence could not be used against Gant,
because he did not know police were after him when he parked the car.

The cases are United States v. Patane, 02-1183, and Arizona v. Gant, 02-1019.