The Supreme Court held, 5-4 (Kennedy for majority, Sotomayor for the
dissent) that a suspect being interrogated must “unambiguously invoke” the right to remain silent or the right to counsel” for questioning to stop.
Summary: Silence during the interrogation does not invoke the right to remain silent. A suspect’s Miranda right to counsel must be invoked “unambiguously”, just as the right to counsel, see Davis v. United States, 512 U. S. 452, 459. If the accused makes an “ambiguous or equivocal” statement or no statement, the police are not required to end the interrogation, or ask questions to clarify the accused’s intent. There is no principled reason to adopt different standards for determining when an accused has invoked the Miranda right to remain silent and the Miranda right to counsel at issue in Davis.
By choosing to speak to the interrogators, a suspect is “waiving” the right to silence. Once the government establishes Miranda warnings were given (and understood), an accused “uncoerced” statements establish an “implied” waiver of the right to remain silence.
The majority says, “Had he wanted to re-main silent, he could have said nothing in response or unambiguously invoked his Miranda rights, ending the interrogation. That he made a statement nearly three hours after receiving a Miranda warning does not overcome the fact that he engaged in a course of conduct indicating waiver.”
Dissent concludes: Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down. 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. Today’s broad new rules are all the more unfortunate because they are unnecessary to the disposition of the case before us.