For the past 23 years at least, any information gleaned from police interrogations after a suspect has requested counsel and without counsel’s presence has been generally inadmissible. This all changes, now.
Thanks to a recent SCOTUS ruling, however, the information/evidence from interrogations where a suspect has asked for counsel, but has not yet received counsel, will no longer be deemed inadmissible in court. Solicitor general, Elena Kagan said the 1986 Michigan v. Jackson decision “serves no real purpose” and offers only “meagre benefits”, and Justice Antonin Scalia, reading the majority opinion (overturning Michigan) said,
Because of the protections created by this court in Miranda and related cases, there is little if any chance that a defendant will be badgered into waiving his right to have counsel present during interrogation.
Awfully presumptuous, I’d say. Many people “voluntarily” relinquish their right to be free from unlawful searches and seizures, too, at the request of an armed police officer who has been trained to know just what to say in order to convince the suspect to relinquish his/her rights. Many people in these circumstances would behave differently, if they had access to counsel (or even that guy from the Don’t Talk to Cops videos). And in police custody, so would just about anyone, suspected of just about anything.
This has absolutely nothing to do with whether the suspect is guilty.
If the police badger a suspect by interrogation—especially after suspect requests counsel and before suspect receives same—it stands to reason that suspect’s request was not honored, which is to say that the continued interrogation is a violation of certain constitutional guarantees. Therefore, any information/evidence obtained as a result of this interrogatory chicanery, a thinly-veiled attempt to circumvent those basic protections, was typically deemed inadmissible.
Not anymore.
The essence of such protections as Miranda, Michigan, etc., is that they create an incentive to respect the guarantees of the Fifth and Sixth amendments, without which police officers and other state agents are effectively empowered to run roughshod over the “rights” they are supposed to protect.