A Suspect is a person that, on the basis of facts or circumstances, is suspected of having committed a crime. Suspects have a broad range of rights during questioning, including the right to remain silent and the right to have an attorney present during interrogation. Modern police training teaches detectives how to use psychological techniques like threats and promises in order to extract confessions from suspects. These tactics are inherently coercive and have produced an alarming number of involuntary and false confessions.
In theory, a reviewing court should be able to distinguish between vulnerable suspects and those who are more sophisticated and less susceptible to the police’s coercive tactics. But in practice, judges are reluctant to suppress damning evidence without a clear showing that it was obtained through brutal tactics. And once Miranda warnings have been provided and waived, a judge is very unlikely to consider whether a suspect’s statements were voluntarily made.
The glaring problem with special formal protections for police suspects is that they appear to skew the relationship between sophistication and protection in a very dangerous way. In a society that values the appearance of justice, this imbalance threatens to undermine the system’s normative legitimacy. The criminal law should be distributed in a manner that is fair and evenhanded, not one that favors insiders over outsiders. In the end, granting additional affirmative protections for a very small group of supposedly sophisticated suspects is just as bad from distributive perspectives as invoking Miranda warnings.