In 1966, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments held hearings in DC on Miranda. No official transcript was printed (for reasons we can skip over for now). In the Bayh Archives, though, I did find an unofficial transcript of the testimony by the first witness–Professor Yale Kamisar.
Kamisar gave a powerful defense of Miranda by playing for the Subcommittee a tape of a coerced confession in another case. (He said he played this tape for his students as well.) I’m still going through the details–criminal procedure takes me outside of my comfort zone.
Another witness was Barry Kroll, who was Escobedo’s attorney before the Supreme Court. Here’s an interesting exchange from his testimony, which Senator Bayh quoted in a letter to a voter:
“May I make an observation here. I think that everyone would recognize that Al Capone was guilty of many crimes against a state, a syndicate gangster. And yet no one was able to take him into a closed room and interrogate him fairly, but interrogation without surcease, trying to point out all the facts that the state had against him, to him to make a statement. He had his lawyers there, and if the government wanted to convict this guilty man, they had to find some crime where he made a mistake. And they ultimately got him for income tax evasion.
Why should the man who is wealthy, sophisticated or armed with counsel be immunized from the state questioning him privately, and a man who is unsophisticated, unintelligent, poor, be subjected to questioning?”
And in answer to this question Senator Hruska, of Nebraska made the following comment: “If the Chairman will yield, the witness asked for an answer to his question, why should the rich and sophisticated be allowed something that the poor should not be allowed, I say they should not.”