Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
The impact of United States Supreme Court decisions on the administration of criminal justice by police and lower courts in this country has been the subject of extensive research. A number of empirical studies on the impact of Mapp v. Ohio (1961) (Kuh, 1962; Oaks, 1970), Miranda v. Arizona (1966) (Reiss and Black, 1967; Yale Law Review, 1967), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) (Blumberg, 1966; Sudnow, 1965) and in re Gault (1967) (Duffee and Siegel, 1971) have indicated that Supreme Court decisions have a much smaller impact upon police and court practices than might be expected and that systemic requirements of criminal justice agencies frequently override and suppress the policy objectives of these decisions. The result is the routinization of due process in a way which prevents its requirements from substantially interfering with the operation of the systems involved and the perversion of these requirements to serve organizational ends rather than the ends of justice. These studies raise substantial questions as to the efficacy of attempting to alter the operations of the criminal justice system through constitutional rule-making by the courts.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wish to thank the many district attorneys, assistant district attorneys and state Attorneys General who were kind enough to assist me in the gathering of the data for this article.