Read him his rights.

If the police question you for two hours in an interrogation room, is it an interrogation?

No, says the fab five of our Supreme Court...once again confounding common sense.

Yarborough v. Alvarado came out today. You can read it here. The question is this: Is a Miranda warning required where a 17 year old boy is questioned in an interrogation room at a police station?
Here, the police suspected Alvarado of helping to attemot to steal a truck, leading to the shooting death of the truck's owner. Police called Alvarado's parents, asking them to bring the boy to the station. Upon arrival, Police denied a request that the parents be able to sit in on the questioning, saying, "What do we have here; we are going to question a suspect." They then sat him in a room, asking question for two hours during which time Alvarado admitted to his involvement.

A constitutional prerequisite to an interrogation is notification of your right to an attorney present at the questioning, that what you say will come back to haunt you in court, and that you can get a court appointed attorney. If you are suposed to get a Miranda warning and you don't, what you say during the interrogation cannot be used in court...with some exceptions inapplicable here.
Forseeably, the major question here is: when is the Miranda warning evoked?
The answer is: when there is 1) an interrogation and 2) the person is in custody.

This case was about custody...there's no doubt the interrogation prong is met. The general test for whether the suspect is in cusdody is:
Would a reasonable person in this setting feel free to get up and leave?

And this brings us to Justoce Kennedy's majority opinion today.

I see two major parts of this decision. The first is not so monumental, and it is, apparently, not so much a threat to the custody issue in Miranda. It's really more a judicial review question.
Alvarado had filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus, and the writ was denied. To succeed with such a writ, you need to show the court missapplied clearly established law. Kennedy says the denial of a habeus threat was OK because there wasn't clear, wrongful use of the law. ie- where the legal boundary is broad (like a question of whether there is cusdody), a judge has some leeway.

Second, Kennedy says the 9th circuit (which overturned the lower court's habeas denial) was wrong. The 9th Cir. reversed because the Judge had not taken into account age, etc...ie- the 9th circuit wanted a complete circumstances consideration. Kennedy writes that the custody inquiry for Miranda is objective...and shouldn't demand cops to sit down and ponder all the circumstances before deciding whether to issue a Miranda warning.

I find this wierd. Is Kennedy, on one hand saying the custody question is objective and well defined, but on the other saying the question of custody is vague, and reasonable people can differ? Perhaps a few more readings will clear that up.

Anyway, I find Breyer's dissent refreshing:

The law in this case asks judges to apply, not arcane or complex legal directives, but ordinary common sense. Would a reasonable person in Alvarado's position have felt free simply to get up and walk out of the small room in the station house at will during his 2-hour police interrogation? I ask the reader to put himself, or herself, in Alvarado's circumstances and then answer that question: Alvarado hears from his parents that he is needed for police questioning. His parents take him to the station. On arrival, a police officer separates him from his parents. His parents ask to come along, but the officer says they may not. Another officer says, "What do we have here; we are going to question a suspect."
The police take Alvarado to a small interrogation room, away from the station's public area. A single officer begins to question him, making clear in the process that the police have evidence that he participated in an attempted carjacking connected with a murder. When he says that he never saw any shooting, the officer suggests that he is lying, while adding that she is "giving [him] the opportunity to tell the truth" and "tak[e] care of [him]self." Toward the end of the questioning, the officer gives him permission to take a bathroom or water break. After two hours, by which time he has admitted he was involved in the attempted theft, knew about the gun, and helped to hide it, the questioning ends.

What reasonable person in the circumstances--brought to a police station by his parents at police request, put in a small interrogation room, questioned for a solid two hours, and confronted with claims that there is strong evidence that he participated in a serious crime, could have thought to himself, "Well, anytime I want to leave I can just get up and walk out"? If the person harbored any doubts, would he still think he might be free to leave once he recalls that the police officer has just refused to let his parents remain with him during questioning? Would he still think that he, rather than the officer, controls the situation?

There is only one possible answer to these questions. A reasonable person would not have thought he was free simply to pick up and leave in the middle of the interrogation.