The Gatehouses and Mansions: Fifty Years Later
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 6, pp. 19.1-19.17, 2010
43 Pages Posted: 23 Jul 2010 Last revised: 18 Nov 2010
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The Gatehouses and Mansions: Fifty Years Later
The Gatehouses and Mansions: Fifty Years Later
Abstract
In 1965, Yale Kamisar authored “Equal Justice in the Gatehouses and Mansions of American Criminal Procedure,” an article that would come to have an enormous impact on the development of criminal procedure and American norms of criminal justice. Today, that article is a seminal work of scholarship, hailed for “playing a significant part in producing some of the [Warren] Court’s most important criminal-procedure decisions” (White 2003-04), including Miranda v. Arizona. The most influential concept Kamisar promoted may have been his recognition of a gap that loomed between the Constitutional rights actualized in mansions (courts) versus gatehouses (police stations). Kamisar passionately detailed how the Constitution and its jurisprudential progeny failed to protect suspects when those rights mattered most: when facing questioning by police. This article discusses where this thesis stands today in light of nearly 50 years of legal developments and social science research.
Keywords: Miranda, Constitution, interrogation, rights, police, confessions, criminal procedure
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