Ernesto Miranda

Ernesto Arturo Miranda (March 9, 1941 – January 31, 1976) was an American laborer whose criminal conviction on kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery charges based on his confession under police interrogation was set aside in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, which ruled that criminal suspects must be informed of their right against self-incrimination and their right to consult with an attorney before being questioned by police.

This warning is known as a Miranda warning.

After the Supreme Court decision invalidated Miranda's initial conviction, the state of Arizona tried him again.

At the second trial, with his confession excluded from evidence, he was convicted.

He was sentenced to 20–30 years in prison.

Ernesto Arturo Miranda was born in Mesa, Arizona, on March 9, 1941.

Miranda began getting in trouble when he was in grade school.

Shortly after his mother died, his father remarried.

Miranda and his father didn't get along very well; he kept his distance from his brothers and stepmother as well.

Miranda's first criminal conviction was during his eighth-grade year.

The following year, he was convicted of burglary and sentenced to a year in reform school.

In 1956, about a month after his release from the Arizona State Industrial School for Boys (ASISB), he ran afoul of the law once more and was returned to ASISB.

Upon his second release from reform school, he relocated to Los Angeles, California.

Within months of his arrival in L.A., Miranda was arrested (but not convicted) on suspicion of armed robbery and for some sex offences.

After two and a half years in custody, the 18-year-old Miranda was extradited back to Arizona.

He drifted through the southern U.S. for a few months, spending time in jail in Texas for living on the street without money or a place to live, and was arrested in Nashville, Tennessee, for driving a stolen car.

Miranda was sentenced to one year and a day in the federal prison system because he had driven the stolen vehicle across state lines.

He spent his sentence in Chillicothe, Ohio, and later in Lompoc, California.

For the next couple of years, Miranda kept out of jail, working at various jobs, until he became a laborer on the night loading dock for the Phoenix Produce Company.

At that time he started living with Twila Hoffman, a 29-year-old mother of a boy and a girl by another man, from whom she could not afford to obtain a divorce.

On March 13, 1963, Miranda's truck was spotted and license plates recognized by the brother of an 18-year-old kidnapping and rape victim, Lois Ann Jameson (the victim had given the brother a description).

With his description of the car and a partial license plate number, Phoenix Police Department officers Carroll Cooley and Wilfred Young confronted Miranda, who voluntarily accompanied them to the police station and participated in a police lineup.

At the time, Miranda was a person of interest, but not formally in custody.

After the lineup, when Miranda asked how he did, the police implied that he was positively identified, at which point he was placed under arrest, and brought to an interrogation room.

After two hours of interrogation, some of which regarded another offense for which Miranda was separately tried and convicted, Miranda hand-wrote a confession to the kidnapping and rape of Jameson.

At the top of each sheet was the printed certification that "...this statement has been made voluntarily and of my own free will, with no threats, coercion or promises of immunity and with full knowledge of my legal rights, understanding any statement I make can and will be used against me."

After confessing to the officers, Miranda was brought to meet the victim for positive voice identification.

Asked by officers in her presence whether this was the victim, he said, "That's the girl."

The victim stated that the sound of Miranda's voice matched that of the culprit.

Despite the printed statement on top of the sheets that Miranda used to write his confession, "with full knowledge of my legal rights," he was not informed of his right to have an attorney present or of his right to remain silent when he was arrested or before his interrogation.

73-year-old Alvin Moore was assigned to represent him at his trial.

The trial was conducted in mid-June 1963 before Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Yale McFate.

Moore objected to entering the confession by Miranda as evidence during the trial but was overruled.

Mostly because of the confession, Miranda was convicted of rape and kidnapping and sentenced to 20 to 30 years in prison on both charges.

Moore appealed to the Arizona Supreme Court, but the conviction was upheld there.

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.

After Alvin Moore was unable to continue representing Miranda because of health reasons, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Robert J. Corcoran asked John J. Flynn, a criminal defense attorney, to serve pro bono, along with his partner, John P. Frank, and associates Paul G. Ulrich and Robert A. Jensen of the law firm Lewis & Roca in Phoenix to represent Miranda.

They wrote a 2,500-word petition for certiorari arguing that Miranda's Fifth Amendment rights had been violated, and they submitted it to the United States Supreme Court.

On January 31, 1976, Miranda was stabbed to death in Phoenix, Arizona.

A Mexican man, Eseziquiel Moreno Perez, was charged with the murder of Miranda, but fled to Mexico and has never been located.