If you’ve ever watched an American television crime drama, you probably can recite a suspect’s rights along with the arresting officers. Those requirements—that prisoners must be informed that they may remain silent, and that they have the right to an attorney—are associated in the public mind with Ernesto Miranda, convicted in Arizona of kidnapping and rape in 1963.
But the “Miranda rights” routinely read to suspects as a result of the 1966 Supreme Court decision that overturned his conviction have their roots in a much earlier case: that of a young Chinese man accused of murdering three of his countrymen in Washington, D.C. in 1919.
The nation’s capital had never seen anything quite like it: a triple murder of foreign diplomats. The victims worked for the Chinese Educational Mission and were assassinated in the city’s tony Kalorama neighborhood. With no obvious motive or leads to go on, the Washington police were baffled. But once they zeroed in on a suspect, they marched into his Manhattan apartment, searched it without a warrant, and pressured him to return to Washington with them. There they held him incommunicado in a hotel room without formal arrest to browbeat him into a confession.
The young Chinese man, Ziang Sung Wan, a sometime student who had been seen at the death house on the day of the murders, was suffering from the aftereffects of the Spanish flu, and the police took advantage of his distress. He was questioned day and night, even when he was in severe pain and did not wish to speak. After nine days, he was brought back to the scene of the murder and subjected to harsh interrogation. Food and water were denied, as were bathroom breaks. Racial epithets were hurled. Finally, under extreme duress, he confessed and was immediately arrested.
At trial, Wan recanted his confession, which he claimed he had made only to stop the relentless grilling by the detectives. But the judge refused to exclude it, and he was convicted of first-degree murder, which carried the penalty of death by hanging. His attorneys made their objection to the confession the centerpiece of their appeal to a higher court. But the appellate court, citing an 1897 U.S. Supreme Court precedent, sustained the verdict, ruling that only promises or threats from the police would have given cause to exclude it.