(ANSA) - NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 09 - Yale Kamisar, the American jurist whose writings were the basis of the "Miranda warning" for the protection of suspects in the hands of the police, died in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the age of 92.
"'You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you. You have the right to declare a lawyer before the interrogation who is with you if you wish' ', is one of the most famous sentences of jurisprudence (but also of crime stars and stripes) that every police officer for 66 years now must read to every arrested.
Behind this sentence was the work of Kamisar, who was just 37 years old but in the mid-1960s, as the journalist "Time" testified, was already considered the foremost indirect criminal expert in the United States.
The opinion of the Supreme Court that instituted the warning was the then Chief Justice Earl Warren in an era of enlargement of civil rights and liberties, but the basis were the writings of Kamisar, writes the "Washington Post" today, and in particular a 1965 article in which the lawyer, born in the Bronx to a family who fled Hitler's racial executions, contrasted the attention that defendants were treated in court with the Wild West that reigned during police interrogations.
"The court is a splendid place where defense attorneys flail and strut and prosecutors get clubbed. But what happens before a defendant reaches the safety and comfort of this real mansion? Here's the problem.
Usually he has to go through first .
a very less private building, a police station with bare little rooms and lockable doors ".
Backed by this opinion, Warren had ruled that the Fifth Amendment's right to remain silent to avoid self-indictment was valid not only in court, but also in police custody.
The reference case "Miranda v Arizona" named after Ernesto Miranda, sentenced to 20 years in prison for a 1963 rape kidnapping in Phoenix, has since entered the lexicon: today it is said that the suspects duly advised of their rights have been " Mirandize ".
(HANDLE).