The Sixth Circuit, sitting en banc, recently decided a very interesting Miranda case. Garner v. Mitchell, available here, is a capital case. The defendant stole a woman's purse, took a taxi to her house, robbed it, and set it on fire to conceal his fingerprints, killing five of the six children who were sleeping in the house. Police arrested him and administered Miranda warnings, and he confessed to setting the fire. He was prosecuted for murder, convicted, and sentenced to death. The case made its way through the state appellate and post-conviction process, and eventually, the defendant filed a federal habeas petition, arguing, among other things, that he lacked the capacity to make a knowing and voluntary waiver of his Miranda rights, by virtue of his IQ of 76. (Apparently, he hadn't raised this issue, at least not in quite this way, in the state courts, but the federal courts decided to hear the issue anyhow, for reasons that aren't relevant to this discussion.) The defense presented considerable evidence of the defendant's abusive upbringing, low educational level, and borderline intellectual functioning. The defense also presented evidence from an expert who had administered an instrument called the Grasso test to the defendant. The test attempts to measure an individual's ability to understand the Miranda warnings; the defendant's results on the test were mixed. On the other side of the ledger, there was testimony at a pretrial suppression hearing that the defendant had expressed his understanding of his Miranda rights and had executed [...]
Faculty Coordinators
