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Law in Contemporary Society
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Undermining Rights, Legitimizing Discretion: The Troubling Legacy of New York v. Quarles and the Imbalance in Judicial Experience-- By AlexHeycke - 23 Apr 2024New York v. Quarles and the Public Safety ExceptionIn New York v. Quarles, the Supreme Court held that our 5th Amendment Miranda right is subject to a public safety exception: when there is a need to protect the public or police from any immediate danger, pre-_Miranda_ statements–and evidence gathered on their basis–are admissible evidence against the accused. Apart from crucially undermining what should be a categorical right and betraying , the Quarles court reflects–and greatly feeds into–another problem: the extreme deference to police discretion in our constitutional law. Although the court described the threat to public safety as needing to be “objectively reasonable,” it immediately softened the objectiveness of its standard by noting that its holding would “free [officers] to follow their legitimate instincts.” While there was some precedent in allowing some level of error set by cases like Adams v. Williams and Terry v. Ohio (essentially applying a reasonable person standard with some room for error), Quarles was the first case to make such a wholesale, explicit endorsement of police’s ability to generally make the correct decisions while acting on mere whim.Troubling Implications of QuarlesSuch an endorsement is problematic for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it justifies over-intrusive policing on a faulty premise. It is now well established that the instincts of police officers are often incorrect: they operate on various heuristics that correlate poorly with the presence of an actual threat, such as race. And as the Stanford Prison Experiment established in 1971, ordinary, well-intentioned people can still behave ruthlessly towards others under certain circumstances, namely, being in a position of clear authority over them. Law enforcement officials, who often have such a degree of authority and power of the communities they police, coupled with some degree of insulation from the consequences of their actions via qualified immunity, are thus the last group whose authority to act on vague notions of instinct should be expanded. Second, the decision serves an expressive function, legitimizing the use of police discretion in the eyes of the public. While people generally form their own opinions, most of us also outsource our judgments to some extent: if a credible appearing actor makes a certain assessment, we often accept the truth of this assessment. While clear evidence to the contrary might prevent us from following its lead, many people are not presented with such clear evidence of the fact that excessive police discretion is an issue. The decision of an institution that they believe to be a bastion of detached, objective decisionmaking (a notion that I mistakenly possessed before entering law school)–thus could be enough to sway the opinions of the ambivalent. This is especially the case in the age of algorithmically tailored social media feeds where the information one is presented with can range from entirely true to hardly reflective of reality at all.What Can Be Done?Finding a comprehensive solution to this problem with such complex and interwoven causes is beyond the scope of this paper. But perhaps one of the most easily identifiable causes of this troubling trend–the undoing of which would be a crucial step towards a solution–is the massive imbalance in the federal judiciary between former prosecutors and public defenders. Until Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the Supreme Court, there had not been a justice with experience as a public defender on the Court since Thurgood Marshall. By comparison, four justices currently on the Supreme court have served as prosecutors at some point in their career. The imbalance is equally egregious in lower federal courts, where former prosecutors outnumber former public defenders 5 to 1. Among Trump appointees, this ratio was over 10 to 1. While in an ideal world, where each judge possessed Felix Cohen’s dialectic hydraulic interpretation press, such an imbalance might not be an issue, this is not such a world. Judges are human, and thus susceptible to a wide range of cognitive biases. It’s entirely inconceivable that someone who has spent a large part of their career advocating for deference to the police, operating on the assumption that police’s instincts can be trusted, can evaluate such topics with detached impartiality. To temper the influence prosecutorial bias, it is necessary to increase the representation of public defenders in the federal judiciary. Only then will there be a chance to materially undermine Quarles and its legacyYou are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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