• By
  • Nathan Koppel





The North Carolina case involves a seventh-grader who was suspected in a pair of home break-ins. A uniformed officer took the 13-year-old student, identified as J.D.B., from his middle school classroom to a conference room, where two officers and two school administrators questioned him for 30 to 45 minutes, moving from “small talk” to admonishments to “do the right thing” and warning of possible “juvenile detention before court,” WSJ reports.

J.D.B., who did not receive a Miranda warning, confessed. North Carolina courts held that J.D.B. never was in custody, and therefore no Miranda warning was necessary, WSJ reports.

But the Supreme Court reversed the lower-courts’ holding that J.D.B was not entitled to a Miranda warning. A child is more likely to feel pressed by the demands of adult authority figures, Sotomayor wrote, adding that this is “self-evident to anyone who was a child once himself, including any police officer or judge.”

In dissent, Justice Alito wrote that the majority “shifts the Miranda custody determination from a one-size-fits-all…test into an inquiry that must account for at least one individualized characteristic—age.”  The Miranda rule’s principal benefit, he said, was its “rigid” standard for deciding when warnings are required.

Kennedy usually joins other conservatives in siding with police in criminal procedure cases, but he has split with them in juvenile justice cases, including his finding that certain juveniles are ineligible for the harshest punishments of death or life imprisonment without chance of parole, according to WSJ.

The holding in the North Carolina case was one of four criminal procedure cases decided today; the others, which were unanimous or nearly so, variously favored police or defendants.