Is It Time To Junk The Miranda Rules?

New technology has overthrown the logic behind the Supreme Court's ruling

The U.S. crime rate is falling.

In particular, the murder rate in 2025 was the lowest it has been since 1960. It dropped by about 20% just since the preceding year, as this chart shows.

It’s hard to say exactly why the rate has dropped so sharply. President Trump, who is eager to claim credit, wants you to attribute it to the removal of dangerous illegal aliens. But the decline started prior to his return to the White House. So that can’t be more than a portion of the answer.

Even so, the U.S. still has a much higher violent crime rate than most other industrialized countries. Our intentional homicide rate is almost eight times that of Italy and 18 times that of Japan.

One cause for that is the low American rate of solving crimes. Since many acts of violent predation are those of repeat offenders, we wind up with large numbers of murders being committed by people who should never have been on the street in the first place.

That raises the question of why so many criminals in the U.S. get away with their crimes. The extent of the difficulty is indicated by the national homicide clearance rate. The clearance rate isn’t a statistic telling us how many criminals are convicted and sentenced to prison. It merely tells us the percentage of cases in which police and prosecutors identify the guilty parties and arrest or seek to extradite them.

That rate abruptly declined after the Supreme Court’s decision in the Miranda vs. Arizona case. Coincident with that was the explosive growth in the number of violent crimes committed in America’s big cities during the late 1960s.

That these are connected to one another is confirmed by a detailed examination of the matter that appeared in an article in the Stanford Law Review.