Mirandized to death?
In the decades leading into the mid-1960s, Americans associated the name Miranda with a whacky movie personality whose roles characterized stereotypical comedic Latinx kitsch. Less amusing — terrifying in fact — were the brutal police beatings of black youth also characteristic of the era. In time both would change.
Few remember Carmen Miranda. Since 1966, variations of Arturo Miranda’s surname — Mirandized, Miranda warning and Miranda rights — has informed life and death policing of Americans, especially black men and boys.
Black septuagenarians and older souls knew of a time in their youth when black boys routinely were beaten and tortured by police in the station house, or on the way to it, as a matter of course. Whether accused of a minor offense or a more serious matter, a trip “downtown” meant a whipping was coming. So real was the threat that my mother installed a police lock, a Rube Goldberg contraption whose steel pole ensured cops could not kick down our apartment door and seize any of her five boys for a precinct bludgeoning on whatever pretext.
Objectives of the abuse varied. But the official misconduct typically produced a confession, a flipping or some other coerced outcome. I became aware of the phenomenon as a black teenager in New York City’s East Harlem. Brutalized older teens would regale us with tales of the thrashing at “The Tombs,” the ominous nickname for the Manhattan lockup, almost as a right of passage that I hoped never to pass. Then Miranda rights appeared.
Ne’er-do-well Arizonan Ernesto Arturo Miranda had spent his youth in and out of reform schools, jails and prisons for minor and medium-level crimes. In 1965, the 24-year-old was arrested and interrogated by police on suspicion of kidnapping, rape and armed robbery. Miranda confessed to the crimes.
Miranda was convicted, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that his conviction was unconstitutional and overturned it. Miranda’s Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights were violated, the court found in its June 13, 1966, decision. His confession had been delivered without a proper understanding of his right against self-incrimination and his right to consult an attorney before being questioned by police.
Gradually, and reluctantly, the jailhouse beat-down was replaced with: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You are entitled to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights I have just read to you? With these rights in mind, do you wish to speak to us?”
These boring and unfulfilling legalities did not completely dissuade bloodthirsty police mobsters. In several high-profile cases, the Miranda mantras were supplemented with illegal lynchmob police depositions before victims could even meet with jailhouse injustice.
In Pittsburgh, in 1976, prominent attorney Glenn Mahone — in front of his pregnant wife, Andrea — and his brother, Harvey, were terrorized, beaten and humiliated on a North Side street by the local police. And, in 1991, the world watched the Los Angeles police brutalize Rodney King, courtesy of citizenry documentation by video camera.
These egregious abuses trumped Miranda warnings yet did not, mercifully, result in death. But in our post-Miranda era, a number of police gangsters still work around the Mirandizing requirement by choking, strangling and shooting black victims to death. Horrifyingly assigning the final right to remain permanently silent, the police terrorists have rarely been arrested, much less convicted. In case after case, police union cabals protect the accused, while jurors who believe in the sanctity of the blueclad felons insulate them from facing blind justice.
A Rutgers University study found that between 2013 and 2017 black men were 2.5 times more likely — 1 in 1,000 — than white men to be killed by law enforcement. Young men between the ages of 25 and 29 experienced the greatest police-involved mortality, which is disturbingly the sixth-leading cause of death in young African American men.
Although Arturo Miranda was not African American, thousands of “beneficiaries” of the Miranda provisions are black boys. Quite simply, because of Miranda warnings, 21st-century black youth do not get confessions — false or otherwise — clubbed out of them as their grandfathers did in the 1900s. Black mothers and other loved ones, however, would rather bandage their youth than bury them.
A grim reality of black life in white America brims with too much of both. This nightmare reality will endure until the equal protection under the law clause that is embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is regarded as applicable finally to Americans of African descent.
That would require no more deadly blue knees on black necks; no more murderous no-knockwarrant assaults on black ladies’ homes in quest of people already in custody; and no more deadly muggings of exercise addicts running to untimely demises at the hands of criminal families headed by a fired policeman.