Fact and Fiction in Constitutional Criminal Procedure (original) (raw)

This Article empirically examines questions of rights knowledge and rights assertion in order to better understand the processes that contribute to people's assertions of their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights. Using quantitative and qualitative results from survey data, we test some of the assumptions about rights knowledge and rights assertion that are embedded in United States Supreme Court opinions. Our findings suggest that not only do people, by and large, not know their rights, but that when they try to figure out which rights they possess, the current procedural regime leads them to perform even worse than chance. Rights knowledge is not correlated with demographic factors such as race, social class, or even prior experience as a subject of criminal investigation. Furthermore, we find that a sense of personal efficacy in police-citizen interactions, specifically the willingness to assert rights, is positively correlated with social position. That is, people in h...