Phoenix, Arizona, 1963 Ernesto Miranda was a poor Mexican immigrant living in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1963. Miranda was arrested after a crime victim identified him in a police lineup. Miranda was charged with rape and kidnapping and interrogated for two hours while in police custody. The police officers questioning him did not inform him of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, or of his Sixth Amendment right to the assistance of an attorney. When Ernest Miranda went with police to their headquarters, it wasn't the first time he had been in police custody. He had been in trouble from the time he was in grade school in Mesa, Arizona, shortly after his mother died and his father remarried. Ernest and his father didn't get along very well, and the boy kept his dist

Miranda's appeal in 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court under the liberal Earl Warren had weighed-in on the side of defendants' rights. They had taken a half step toward Moore's trial claim that a suspect was entitled to have a lawyer when questioned by police in the case of Escobedo v. Illinois (the case was argued on behalf of Illinois by future governor James R. Thompson). In the Escobedo case, the court ruled when police are no longer conducting a general inquiry into an unsolved crime but are focusing on a particular suspect in custody, refusing to allow that suspect to consult with an attorney and failing to warn the suspect of his right to remain silent is denial of the assistance of counsel in violation of the Sixth Amendment. It took the Arizona Supreme Court 18 months to get around to Miranda's case, but found that the U.S. Supreme Court's immensely unpopular Escobedo decision - which freed a confessed murderer - did not apply to Miranda. The Arizona court upheld his rape and kidnapping convictions. Police acted reasonably in assuming that a man with Miranda's criminal record would understand his due process rights, the court ruled. McFarland did go on to say that the right to counsel was one of the most important rights an accused person had, and that the necessity of protecting the general population from lawbreakers must not come at the expense of individual rights, no matter how heinous the crime. Ernest Miranda had spent the last two years sitting in the maximum security prison near Florence, Arizona, unaware of the role history would have for him. All he knew was that he wanted out of Florence and that the Arizona justice system had done him wrong. Filing as a pauper, Miranda submitted his plea for a writ of certiorari, or request for review of his case to the U.S. Supreme Court in June, 1965. The state director contacted Alvin Moore to see if he was willing to take the case to the Supreme Court, with a little help from the ACLU. Moore, who felt strongly that Miranda was not being dealt a fair hand by the courts, was unable to take the case because of his physical health at the time. It took several more phone calls on the part of ACLU attorney Robert J. Corcoran before he could find a lawyer who would take on Miranda's case. The question the court needed to decide, they wrote, was whether a suspect needed to know of his right to request counsel, or if police would have to advise the prep of this basic right. Over the summer of 1965, the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, who had fled the oppressive heat and humidity of the District of Columbia and were dispersed around the country, were inundated with requests for cert from appellants who had fallen under into the Escobedo morass. It was clear that something would have to be done quickly to address the legal questions that had arisen. In November 1965, at the daylong intensely private deliberations that were attended only by the nine justices without benefit of their clerks, the decision was made to answer the pleas for help from the federal and state courts who were struggling with just what Escobedo was directing them to do. The case the U.S. Supreme Court chose to hear was Miranda v Arizona. Four other cases with facts similar to Miranda's would be combined for arguments that day, as well. Two months after the nation's highest court agreed to hear arguments in the case of Miranda v. Arizona, John Flynn and John Frank submitted their brief, or outline of the case and legal arguments in support of their position. They continued their argument that Ernest Miranda's Sixth Amendment right to counsel had been violated by the Phoenix Police Department: "The day is here to recognize the full meaning of the Sixth Amendment," they wrote. "We invoke the basic principles (that) 'he requires the guiding hand of counsel at every step in the proceedings against him.' When Miranda stepped into Interrogation Room 2, he had only the guiding hand of Officers Cooley and Young." <

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