Oral Presentation: It’s not “just like on TV”: A corpus analysis and examination of Miranda warnings on TV.

Title: It’s not “just like on TV”: A corpus analysis and examination of Miranda warnings on TV.

Abstract:

The American Miranda warnings are considered an “icon of constitutional law” that have been made “famous” by  television (Covey, 2007). Similarly, the US Supreme Court has also expressed the recognizability and prevalence of the Miranda warnings in American society (Dickerson v. United States 530 US at 443 (2000)). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, excerpts from American police interviews demonstrate references to television representations in communicating Miranda warnings to suspects. Questioning officers’ reliance on pop culture’s representation of Miranda warnings warrants an investigation into how the Mirandizing process is actually presented on TV. This talk presents a review of arrests and custodial interviews in a popular American legal drama, Law & Order: SVU which indicate that suspects are rarely adequately Mirandized on TV. That is, they are either not Mirandized at all or read a partial (reduced) version. When fictional suspects are (partially) Mirandized, a minimum component can be identified. Using this minimum component, I present the results of a corpus analysis of TV subtitles using BYU’s TV Corpus which provides support the observation that Miranda warning are rarely provided in full in popular culture. As such, these findings demonstrate that the Mirandizing process is not “just like on TV”.