You’ve heard it a million times on a million different cop
shows: You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to
have an attorney present during questioning, and so on.
They are your Miranda Rights.
But how many times have you heard them in Spanish or Vietnamese
or even Swahili?
You’ve heard it a million times on a million different cop shows: You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to have an attorney present during questioning, and so on.
They are your Miranda Rights.
But how many times have you heard them in Spanish or Vietnamese or even Swahili?
A challenge to law enforcement officers around the country when they arrest a non-English speaking suspect is verifying what language they speak and then taking the necessary steps to guarantee they understand the full meaning of these rights in their native tongue.
Translations of Miranda Rights and how often they pose problems in the courts are still fairly unexplored issues, said Richard Perry, an attorney and associate professor in the Administration of Justice department at San Jose State University.
“It’s a complicated area, especially with Mexican immigrants,” Perry said. “Often they are not fully literate and have not been fully educated. Some are not even good Spanish speakers because they speak a different dialect.”
Law enforcement officers in San Benito County use a multitude of avenues to try to accurately issue a proper Miranda warning to non-English speaking suspects.
“We have a good bilingual representation, so we usually take care of it that way,” said San Benito County Sheriff Curtis Hill.
If a suspect speaks a language or dialect that either department doesn’t have a representative for, they will first try to find an interpreter in a neighboring department to translate the Miranda warning.
“We’d call a nearby agency like San Jose, Monterey or Salinas and see if they have an officer to help us out,” said Hollister police detective Tony Lamonica. “There’s always an interpreter somewhere.”
If that fails, the sheriff’s department can utilize a service out of Monterey called Language Line Services.
Language Line has interpreters, proficient in more than 150 languages throughout the country who provide emergency translations for hundreds of organizations across the nation, said Dale Hansman, public relations director.
Many police officers have Miranda cards with the service’s number on the back in case they need help in issuing Miranda warnings, Hansman said.
“It gives the step-by-step process to using Language Line,” Hansman said. “The law enforcement agent reads it and in turn the interpreter has a three-way conversation over the phone.”
Ideally, law enforcement agents would like to have the Miranda warning given face to face by someone in law enforcement, but if the situation is one that calls for an obscure language or dialect, they must use whatever they can.
“We’ve never had any problems with translations,” Hansman said of the service, which has been in existence for more than 20 years. “Our interpreters are highly trained.”
While this service is available to law enforcement agents in San Benito County, most of the time it is never used because “we rarely run into that,” Hill said.
If a Miranda warning is given improperly, it can lead to any number of side effects in court, from confessions being deemed inadmissible to evidence being thrown out, and a multitude of other issues.
“It’s ideal for the police to try to get a video recording of the rights being given in the beginning,” Perry said. “The prosecution would like that because then they could go back and be retranslated.”
Law enforcement agencies in California have vehemently resisted this because of investigation tactics interrogators use while interviewing suspects, Perry said.
“Trained police investigators do a lot of tricky stuff sometimes,” Perry said. “The really responsible departments (videotape) now.”
Both the Hollister Police Department and San Benito County Sheriff’s Department videotape interrogations, said Hill and Sgt. Andy Burgess of the police department.
“If we bring in a suspect on a pretty good crime, we try to do it,” Burgess said.
The sheriff’s department doesn’t videotape interviews on minor crimes, but anything major such as murder, robbery or rape are always taped, Hill said.
Because the translation process is an equivocal one, many times a single mistranslated word can render a confession or piece of evidence obsolete.
This is why agencies must have the best possible language translation services available, said Steven Smith, a professor at Gavilan College and a former investigator for the Santa Cruz District Attorney’s Office.
“The courts take the quality of each translation on a case-by-case basis,” Smith said. “They can get language experts to listen to the tapes that the police kept (of the Miranda warning and ensuing interrogation) to see if it all lines up. If it doesn’t, there’s a Miranda issue.”
There is not a good record of what constitutes adequacy of translations for past cases, and how many confessions or pieces of evidence have been tainted because of mistranslation, Perry said.
“It’s fairly arcane,” he said. “There is not a clear line… No one agrees on how to measure it. It’s usually left up to the courts to use common sense to decide.”
