Plurality Opinion
Souter, writing for the plurality, focused on the actual effectiveness of Miranda warnings given after an earlier unwarned confession. Just giving the warnings is not necessarily good enough. Instead, a court must ask, "Could the warnings effectively advise the suspect that he had a real choice about giving an admissible statement at that juncture? Could they reasonably convey that he could choose to stop talking even if he had talked earlier?"
The plurality opinion gives some guidance on when an intermediate warning should be considered to be effective. Such a warning is likely to mislead a defendant about his rights when it is made "in the midst of coordinated and continuing interrogation." Courts should therefore consider "the completeness and detail of the questions and answers in the first round of interrogation, the overlapping content of the two statements, the timing and setting of the first and the second, the continuity of police personnel, and the degree to which the interrogator's questions treated the second round as continuous with the first."
Read more about this topic: Missouri V. Seibert
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