Rights Ruling

On chatting and busing

Ever since the landmark Miranda decision in 1966, police have been prohibited from formally interrogating any person they take into custody if he invokes his right to remain silent until his lawyer is on hand. But does that mean officers cannot try to maneuver a suspect into speaking up about his crime in, say, casual chitchat? Yes indeed, the Supreme Court said last week. In a 6-to-3 ruling in a Rhode Island murder case, the Justices declared that Miranda bars "any words or actions ... that the police should know are reasonably likely to elicit an incriminating response from the suspect."

In the case under question, the court upheld the conviction of a man who, his lawyers argued, had been the victim of a police ploy to get him to incriminate himself. The defendant, Thomas J. Innis, was picked up by Providence police several days after he killed a cab driver with a shotgun, which he subsequently hid. On the way to the station house, one patrolman remarked to his companion about the handicapped children at a school near the arrest site: "God forbid one of them might find a weapon with shells and they might hurt themselves." Innis spoke up and directed the officers to the shotgun. His conviction at trial was overturned by the Rhode Island Supreme Court on the grounds that key evidence, including the gun, was obtained improperly.

While supporting a broad definition of what constitutes interrogation, the court in last week's ruling decided that the police had not infringed on Innis' rights. In the majority opinion, Justice Potter Stewart observed that the patrolmen had no reason to think Innis was unusually disoriented or particularly susceptible to observations about the welfare of the handicapped children; the officers' "offhand remarks" therefore should not be viewed as a form of interrogation or its "functional equivalent." Two of the dissenting Justices, Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, felt the remarks should indeed have been read as an appeal to the suspect's conscience. But Justice John Paul Stevens went further, rejecting the majority's definition of interrogation as a "plain departure" from Miranda's principles.

In another key decision, the U.S. Supreme Court last week affirmed a lower-court ruling that rejected a plan to bus children between Atlanta's predominantly black schools and the mainly white institutions in nine surrounding suburban districts. The decision, which was not accompanied by a written opinion outlining the court's reasoning, was a blow to the flagging hopes of school-integration supporters that the Justices might be receptive to cross-district busing plans now before various federal courts. The advocates argue such broader plans are necessary because the white flight to the suburbs has left central-city school districts so heavy with minorities that integration becomes meaningless.

Undeterred, the Justice Department asked a federal court in Houston three days later to integrate the city's school system with 22 surrounding districts. The agency argues that Houston's situation differs from Atlanta's because some districts in the Atlanta case had set up desegregation programs, while so far integration efforts in the Houston area consist of a voluntary-busing plan that the Justice Department calls "inadequate."

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