Source: boston.com
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In a narrowly split decision, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expanded its limits on the famous Miranda rights for criminal suspects on Tuesday — over the dissent of new Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who said the ruling turned Americans’ rights of protection from police abuse “upside down.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, said a suspect who goes ahead and talks to police after being informed he doesn’t have to has waived his right to remain silent.

So if you’re arrested and Mirandized and then you start talking, you’ve given up the right to remain silent and the police can continue to interrogate you. My interpretation of “you have the right to remain silent” and “anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law” was that you could stop the interview at any time (thereby exercising your right to remain silent). Also:

This decision means that police can keep shooting questions at a suspect who refuses to talk as long as they want in hopes that the person will crack and give them some information, said Richard Friedman, a University of Michigan law professor.

Can you imagine the poor, innocent people who would get terrorized by this and then crack under pressure because they don’t want the police in their face anymore, admitting to something they didn’t do? True, the police should know for sure if the person they are interrogating indeed wants to invoke his or her Miranda rights. But I can imagine a lot of people being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being immensely intimidated by the notion of police officers yelling at them. I agree with Justice Sotomayor’s written dissent of the ruling:

Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent — which counterintuitively requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.

It’s the whole “I’m gonna assume you don’t mind talking to me” mentality that this change can bring up that’s discomforting.