The Fight for the Right to Remain Silent
Where did Miranda warnings begin?
In my mid-twenties, I worked in banking. Our clients were overconfident white men in their 50s, seeking financing for large real estate projects. Like many, Jerry Colangelo was stocky, gracious, charming, and blustery. A hundred years earlier he would have been a traveling preacher. After success as a college basketball player, he worked his way up through the business side of the sport. By 1989, when I met him, he owned the Phoenix Suns and wanted to build a downtown arena.
Colangelo toured my boss and I around the bleak urban blocks where the arena would sit. The one moment I remember from that day was when he asked me if I’d heard of Miranda warnings. Yes, I told him. Anyone with a TV had become familiar with the police declaration that began, ‟You have the right to remain silent….”
Colangelo pointed into the mid-distance and said something like, ‟Right there. That’s where it happened. That was where Miranda…” But I couldn’t remember the end of his sentence. Was it where Miranda committed his crime? Where he was caught? Where he was booked and confessed? What I did remember was that, in that moment, I realized there was once a real person in Phoenix named Miranda. That stayed with me.
Over three decades later, I decided to chase down the end of Colangelo’s sentence.
I began by tracking down the original news reports on Miranda’s crime. Just before midnight on Saturday, March 2, 1963, an 18-year-old woman finished her job selling refreshments at downtown’s Paramount Theatre. She walked with a coworker two blocks to Seventh Street and boarded a northbound bus. At Seventh and Marlette Street, she got off and walked the three blocks toward the home she shared with her mother, sister, and sister’s husband. The area was still undergoing development, and the sidewalks were dark and deserted.
When a car pulled up behind her, she continued walking, not suspecting any trouble. The driver opened his door and began to follow her. He quickened his pace and grabbed her around the waist. ‟If you don’t scream,” he said, ‟I won’t hurt you.”
He dragged her to his car and shoved her into the backseat. Using rope, he bound her ankles and tied her wrists together behind her back. He drove twenty minutes east into desert land at the foot of what is now called Piestewa Peak, near the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. The man untied the woman, removed her clothes, and raped her. Afterward, he drove her back to her neighborhood and released her. ‟Pray for me,” he said.
The young woman told her sister what happened, and they called the police, who took the report and arranged a medical examination. Detectives struggled to find a suspect. The following weekend, however, everything changed. The victim’s brother-in-law, who now met her at the bus stop each night, noticed a car that matched the one she’d described. He jotted down the license plate and informed the police. They tracked it to Twila Hoffman, who lived with a man with a record of sexual assault, Ernesto Miranda. In a line-up, Miranda looked similar to the rapist, but the victim couldn’t be sure.
Detectives spent two hours with Miranda in an interrogation room. No record was kept. Finally, Miranda signed a confession admitting to kidnapping and rape. Later, he said the cops had promised to reduce the sentence if he admitted the crime. Miranda was convicted of kidnapping and rape, based on the confession. His public defender appealed the case on the basis that Miranda had not been informed of his right to an attorney before confessing. The case wound through the Arizona courts and the appeal was denied.
In 1965, the Phoenix chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union was looking for cases that could establish a defendant’s right to counsel during questioning. They chose to take Miranda’s case to the federal courts. John J. Flynn, a private lawyer known as a master of courtroom oratory, volunteered to lead the appeal.
A year later, the U.S. Supreme Court voided Miranda’s conviction, in a 5–4 decision. Police officers, the majority said, must inform suspects of their constitutional rights before questioning them. Officers began to carry cards that spelled out the needed notification, and the process of reading them became known as the ‟Miranda Warning.”
Conservatives decried the decision and claimed it would hobble crime-fighting. That did not turn out to be the case. In fact, Miranda was retried, and Twila Hoffman testified that Miranda had admitted the crimes to her, too. That confession was admissible, and Miranda was again sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison, just as he’d been at his first trial.
Now I understood the background of the Miranda case, but I still didn’t know what Jerry Colangelo had pointed at in 1989. I visited the location where the story began, the Paramount Theatre, now restored to its original name, the Orpheum. The 1929 Spanish Revival building from cinema’s Golden Age teases the stories its screens once told with a fascinating frieze along its parapet featuring comedy and tragedy masks. I sat for a moment in the October sun in the well-intentioned but bleak pedestrian mall next to the theater today. I was almost half a mile from the Suns’ arena. Colangelo couldn’t have been pointing this far away.
Though I knew it wouldn’t answer my personal mystery, I tracked down a bus map from the time of the crime.
I drove the bus route and stopped where the victim did at Seventh and Marlette Streets. Jordan’s Mexican Restaurant sits at the corner, as it has since 1946. I gobbled some gooey enchiladas. Afterward, I drove the neighborhood, looking for where the victim might have lived. A series of apartment buildings lined the neighboring blocks, but they appeared to have been built after 1963.
I headed back downtown to see if I could figure out where Miranda made his confession. An article noted that in the sixties, the Phoenix Police Department operated out of what is now referred to as the Old City Hall, on First Avenue, between Washington and Jefferson Streets. I discovered a funny thing about Phoenix: the main east-west streets are named for presidents, but for some absurd reason they are not in chronological order.
The Old City Hall, which also contained the Maricopa County Courthouse where Miranda was tried, has the H-shaped plan of many buildings from the 1920s and is covered in what look like sandstone blocks but are actually terra cotta. Could this have been what Jerry Colangelo was pointing to? It was three blocks from the arena and where Miranda had confessed. Fortunately for me, the building today houses the Police Museum, which features an exhibit devoted to the Miranda case.
I was surprised to find that in a museum created by police officers the Miranda exhibit was charming, interactive, and objective. Visitors can see the Miranda lineup, view the original police report and written confession, and follow Miranda’s journey in images and text. A binder includes a laminated copy of Miranda’s first appeal.
The displayed police report understandably blacked out the victim’s name. But because her first, middle, and last names were redacted individually, I could get a good sense of how many characters each had. And though her house number was covered, her street, Citrus Way, still appeared. I had no intention of ever publishing her name, but bumbling around as I was, I thought that knowing more about her might shed some light on the case.
When I paged through the appeal documents, I noted that it referred simply to the victim as the prosecutrix without identifying her. However, buried in the document was an excerpt from the original court record which listed her name, unredacted.
When I got home, it wasn’t hard for me to track down the victim. Using Ancestry.com, I found that her father had died a year before the crime when he was hit by a car while on a walk, and a year after the crime she married. Looking at the six houses on Citrus Way, I found where she lived with her sister, brother-in-law, and mother. Then I typed her name into Google, and something curious happened: auto-complete suggested adding ‟Miranda” to her name. When I did that, I felt like an idiot. The woman had already gone public.
The 2023 movie Miranda’s Victim starred Abigail Breslin, Luke Wilson, Andy Garcia, Ryan Phillipe, Donald Sutherland, and Kyle MacLachlan. The film was written with the cooperation of Patricia Weir Shumway, now in her late 70s and ready to tell her story. Other than being shot in New Jersey — which looks nothing like Phoenix no matter how tight the camera angles — I found it to be an engaging movie that stuck to the facts and detailed the long agony of Shumway’s experience.
Of course, I still wasn’t sure about what Jerry Colangelo had pointed to. I searched for ‟Phoenix arena Miranda” and got back a list of Miranda Lambert concerts. Finally, I came across a 1989 article that warned the construction of the Suns’ arena would displace many businesses, including a notorious bar called La Amapola. It noted that Ernesto Miranda had died there in 1976.
Miranda was released on parole in 1972. He was 32, working a series of dead-end jobs, and selling signed Miranda Warning cards for a couple of bucks apiece. Police arrested him several times on small misdemeanors. Each time, officers read him his Miranda rights. He spent another year in prison on a parole violation.
On January 31, 1976, Miranda was drinking and playing poker at La Amapola bar. Cheating accusations led to a fistfight. Beer bottles crashed to the floor. Bloodied, Miranda went to the restroom to clean up. When he returned, one of the players stabbed him in the chest and stomach with a knife. He died at a hospital a few hours afterward.
Investigating detectives searched the nearby hotels for a man who fit one witness’s description of the killer. They found one and read him his Miranda rights, but he waived them, claiming he’d done nothing wrong. He was photographed, fingerprinted, and released since no other witnesses identified him. Detectives conducted more interviews the following day, and a bar worker positively identified a picture of the man as the murderer. By that time, the killer, a Mexican national, had slipped over the border and was never apprehended.
I got conflicting results on La Amapola’s exact location but was ultimately able to confirm it as 233 South Second Street. Back in the day, Second Street was filled with flophouses and pawnshops and known as ‟The Deuce.” It was a place to procure drugs or prostitutes.
Later I discovered that if I’d been paying more attention to detail at the Police Museum or to the photos I took there, I would have found the bar’s address more easily. I went back downtown to check it out. The city center was very crowded now, and there were police on every corner. Finding a metered parking spot was difficult, and the lots were charging outrageous fees. Then I figured out what was going on: tonight was game four of the World Series at the nearby Chase Field. The Diamondbacks wound up losing both the game and, a day later, the series.
La Amapola’s address placed it in the center of the arena, right below the basketball court. I couldn’t possibly remember where Colangelo and I stood on the undeveloped land in 1989, but I’m sure now that what he was pointing to was the spot where Miranda died.
Once I closed the mystery on the small question of where Colangelo had pointed in 1989, something else happened. I realized that Miranda Rights are misnamed. They should not immortalize a convicted rapist. Instead, they should be named for the man who convinced the Supreme Court that a suspect’s rights to remain silent and obtain legal representation are embedded in the Constitution. That man, though helped by others, was John J. Flynn.
Flynn himself probably merits a biopic. He was born in Tortilla Flat, Arizona. His father was a union organizer who served prison time for rustling cattle. A Marine Corps veteran who fought at Iwo Jima during World War II, Flynn was a serial adulterer who married five times. He was twice arrested for drunk driving — though he beat both cases — and admitted smoking marijuana and stealing a painting from a hotel. He made a lot of money and spent more, often during 24-hour gambling binges in Vegas.
With white hair, a persistent smile, and bright eyes, Flynn looked like an actor playing a courtroom litigator. He worked on cases involving product liability, divorce, fraud, probate, personal injuries, and over one hundred murders. Arguing a point in a courtroom, Flynn spoke with a humility and sincerity that seemed extemporaneous but masked a great deal of strategic forethought. He asked questions no one else considered, often breaking cases open. One proceeding ended in a mistrial when a juror told the judge she had fallen in love with Flynn during the case. Flynn became the most celebrated trial lawyer in Arizona.
Flynn and his partners put their lucrative paid work aside to help the ACLU with the Miranda case. Before the Supreme Court, Flynn framed the discussion by pointing out that most Americans, unless they were rich or educated, did not possess enough legal knowledge or confidence to protect themselves during interactions with the police. Reconstructing Miranda’s arrest and interrogation, he persuaded a bare majority of the court that suspects needed to be advised of their right to remain silent and their right to an attorney before questioning began. In his back-and-forth with the justices, Flynn essentially laid out the language that found its way to the Miranda warning cards that police subsequently used.
So, in my view, police warnings to suspects about their right to an attorney and their right to remain silent ought to be called not Miranda warnings but Flynn warnings.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
