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Miranda turned on a single phrase

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Robert A. Jensen

ONE OF THE LANDMARK decisions in American jurisprudence turned on a single phrase, according to Robert A. Jensen, who, as a newly minted lawyer in 1965, drafted the writ of certiorari that propelled Ernesto Miranda’s Fifth Amendment case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Speaking at the Criminal Law Section’s “The 50 Years of Miranda” program at the Bar’s Annual Convention in Orlando, Jensen said at Miranda’s rape/kidnapping trial, his elderly trial counsel stated: “We object, because the Supreme Court of the United States says a man is entitled to an attorney at the time of his arrest.” While that wasn’t then the law, Jensen said that most “modest an objection” basically “carried the case all the way to its conclusion.” Jensen credited Robert Corcoran, who was then screening cases for the ACLU, for picking up on the phrase that made the Miranda appeal possible. But still, Jensen said, the odds of the SCOTUS accepting the case was “such a long shot” that his boss of only two weeks, John P. Frank, directed him to pen the writ. “I had never posed as a constitutional lawyer, and I had never written one before,” said Jensen, who still practices family law in Phoenix. “I wrote one, yes, Miranda, and I have never written one since. I figure when you are ahead, you quit.”

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