Legal scholar known as the ‘father’ of Miranda warning dies
Yale Kamisar, a law professor whose incisive commentaries helped provide the intellectual underpinning of landmark U.S. Supreme Court rulings guaranteeing protections for criminal defendants and suspects, died Jan. 30 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 92 and had been dubbed the “father of Miranda,” a reference to the recitation of rights known to even the most casual viewer of TV police procedurals:
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have a lawyer. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed for you if you wish.
Kamisar’s son Gordon Kamisar confirmed his death but did not cite a cause.
Kamisar, an emeritus professor at the University of Michigan Law School, spent half a century immersed in some of the most pressing debates surrounding criminal law and the constitutional rights afforded to those accused of violating it. His writings were cited in more than 30 Supreme Court opinions and in legions more decisions of federal and state courts.
“At 37, Kamisar has already produced a torrent of speech and endless writings that easily make him the most overpowering criminal-law scholar in the U.S.,” a writer for Time magazine observed in 1966. That year, Kamisar was cited four times in the Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona.
The Miranda decision was written by Earl Warren, the chief justice who presided over the high court during an era of expansion of civil rights and civil liberties. He appeared to have taken heavily into consideration the thesis that Kamisar laid out in his 1965 essay “Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure.”
In that essay, Kamisar contrasted the care with which defendants were handled in the courtroom with the relative lawlessness that sometimes reigned in the police interrogation room.
“The courtroom is a splendid place where defense attorneys bellow and strut and prosecuting attorneys are hemmed in at many turns,” he wrote in a passage demonstrating his signature literary flair. “But what happens before an accused reaches the safety and enjoys the comfort of this veritable mansion? Ah, there’s the rub. Typically he must first pass through a much less pretentious edifice, a police station with bare back rooms and locked doors.”
In essence, the Supreme Court ruled in the Miranda case that the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination was valid not only in court, but also in police custody. So great is the cultural penetration of the case that suspects duly advised of their rights are said to have been “Mirandized.”
The Supreme Court earlier cited Kamisar’s writings in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the case in which the court ruled that, in accordance with the Sixth Amendment, states must provide lawyers for criminal defendants who cannot not afford to hire them on their own. In a unanimous decision, the court declared it “an obvious truth” that “any person … who is too poor to hire a lawyer, cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.”
Kamisar wrote extensively on Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and championed the “exclusionary rule,” according to which prosecutors may not use in court any evidence gathered in violation of those protections.
When Kamisar retired from the University of Michigan in 2004, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in a tribute published in the Michigan Law Review that though his commentary was “more than occasionally devastating,” it “never extends beyond the realm of the fair.”
Yale Kamisar - he did not have a middle name at birth but later in life sometimes used the middle name Jerome - was born in New York City on Aug. 29, 1929. His father, a bakery salesman, and his mother, a homemaker, had fled antisemitism in Eastern Europe.
Kamisar grew up in the Bronx, where he acquired an accent that years later would inspire the Time journalist, in a description of his professorial persona, to write that “like a Bronx Socrates, he harangues entranced students in thunderous tones.”
Reflecting on his upbringing, he recalled that he began to understand the realities of both injustice and indigence when his bicycle was stolen and his parents told him they could not afford to replace it.
Kamisar received a scholarship to attend New York University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in English in 1950 before enrolling at Columbia Law School. He graduated with the class of 1954 after serving with the Army in the Korean War, where he served as a platoon commander. His decorations included a Purple Heart.
After law school, Mr. Kamisar joined the Washington firm of Covington & Burling, planning to specialize in antitrust law. He changed career paths after taking on the case, pro bono, of a drug convict whose handwritten petition prosecutors sought to use against him.
Kamisar taught at the University of Minnesota Law School from 1957 to 1964 before joining the University of Michigan the next year.
In addition to his work on criminal procedure, he wrote extensively on physician-assisted suicide, which he opposed, in what some observers of his work took as a departure from his usual defense of civil liberties. Kamisar saw the matter differently and regarded laws allowing euthanasia as a slippery slope.