Investigating Miranda waiver decisions: An examination of the rational consequences.

Millions of custodial suspects waive their Miranda rights each year without the benefit of legal counsel. Miranda understanding, appreciation, and reasoning abilities are essential to courts' acceptance of Miranda waivers (Grisso, 2003; Rogers & Shuman, 2005). The question posed to forensic psychologists and psychiatrists in the disputed Miranda waivers is whether a particular waiver decision was knowing, intelligent, and voluntary. Despite the remarkable development of Miranda research in recent decades, studies have generally focused on understanding and appreciation of Miranda rights, but with comparatively minimal emphasis on Miranda reasoning and attendant waiver decisions. Research on defendants' decisional capacities constitutes a critical step in further developing theoretical and clinical models for Miranda waiver decisions. The current study evaluated Miranda waiver decisions for 80 pretrial defendants from two Oklahoma jails to study systematically how rational decision abilities affect defendants' personal waiver decisions. In stark contrast to what was expected, many defendants were able to identify a rational decisional process in their own legal cases, yet cast such reasoning aside and chose a completely contradictory Miranda waiver decision.

Mired in Miranda misconceptions: a study of legally involved juveniles at different levels of psychosocial maturity.

The Supreme Court of the United States has long recognized that the vulnerabilities of juvenile offenders merit special protections due to deficits in experience and maturity. Appellate courts assume that Miranda warnings will inform juvenile suspects of their Miranda rights, and allow them to render knowing and intelligent waivers. This study examines Miranda misconceptions of legally involved juveniles (i.e., juvenile detainees and youth mandated to juvenile justice alternative education) at different levels of psychosocial maturity. These juveniles manifested an unexpectedly large frequency of erroneous Miranda beliefs; each group (low, middle, and high maturity) averaged a dozen or more misconceptions, thus overshadowing substantive differences between maturity groups. However, maturity played an important role in the immediate recall of a Miranda advisement. Alarmingly, both low- and middle-maturity groups displayed less than one-third immediate recall. The high-maturity group performed better, but still failed to recall almost half of the Miranda concepts. The overall findings are discussed with respect to juvenile Miranda comprehension and reasoning.

Investigating the effects of repeated Miranda warnings: do they perform a curative function on common Miranda misconceptions?

In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Supreme Court of the United States required that custodial suspects be apprised of their Constitutional rights against self-incrimination. The Court could not have anticipated the rampant popularization of Miranda warnings in subsequent movies and television dramas. Influenced by public media, many arrestees assume that they already "know" their rights, with no awareness of their misconceptions. The current investigation examines whether repeated exposures to Miranda warnings performs any "curative" function (i.e., dispelling common Miranda misconceptions held by pretrial defendants). The accumulative effects of five different Miranda warnings were tested over a several-hour period on 260 detainees. For the nearly half (113 or 43.5%) with three or more misconceptions, improvement (i.e., ≥2 fewer misconceptions) occurred for only 35 defendants. Predictably, this improved group also tended to display a better understanding of Miranda-relevant vocabulary words and a better recall of the administered Miranda warnings than their unimproved counterparts. On average, the improved group also performed better on general measures of intelligence, and listening and reading comprehension, while still evidencing substantial cognitive deficits. The curative function of Miranda advisements is considered in light of these findings.

The effectiveness of substance use measures in the detection of full and partial denial of drug use.

Appraisals of substance abuse often constitute a key component of psychological assessments affecting both diagnostic and treatment issues. Because of negative consequences, many substance users engage in outright denials and marked minimization regarding their drug use. Psychological measures, especially those with transparent items, are highly vulnerable to this denial. To address this response style, indirect items are often included on substance use measures to identify those who deny their use. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of complete and partial denial on the Drug Abuse Screening Test-20, Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory-3, and Drug Use Screening Inventory-Revised. Partial denial refers to the disacknowledgement of drug-related impairment interfering in multiple domains of a client's functioning. The study used a mixed within- and between-subjects design with 102 inpatient substance users. Each participant completed the study under two conditions: a disclosing condition and an experimental condition (either complete denial or partial denial). Results show partial denial is distinctly different from complete denial across three self-report substance use measures. Importantly, substance users engaging in these denial conditions were often undetected by these measures. Contrary to expectations, subtle scales with indirect item content were only minimally more effective than the face valid scales alone for the assessment of denied drug use.

Decrements in Miranda abilities: an investigation of situational effects via a mock-crime paradigm.

Programmatic research has made important advances during the last decade in understanding how cognitive and psychological variables affect Miranda comprehension and reasoning. However, the effects of situational stressors are largely overlooked in determining the validity of Miranda waivers. As the first systematic investigation, this study uses a 2 × 2 × 2 factorial design on 123 undergraduate participants to examine the effects of being apprehended via a mock crime (i.e., stealing a watch from a Plexiglas case) paradigm on Miranda comprehension and reasoning. Besides the mock-crime condition, the mode of advisement (oral or written) and the length of the warning (124 vs. 228 words) were also investigated. When compared to controls, the mock-crime scenario produced moderate to large effects (ds from .58 to .75) on both Miranda recall and subsequent reasoning. In addition, oral advisements resulted in non-significant trend for decrements in Miranda recall. No main effects were observed for length and no significant interactions were found. Interestingly, specific components (e.g., right to counsel and free legal services) were generally more affected than the more familiar first two components (i.e., right to silence and evidence against you). Within the crime-scenario condition, participants with substantially increased state anxiety predictably performed more poorly than those participants whose state anxiety remained relatively stable. Directions for future research and the implications of these findings on our understanding of Miranda abilities are discussed.