The Miranda penalty: Inferring guilt from suspects' silence

Despite the risks inherent to custodial police interrogation, criminal suspects may waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning in fear that exercising their rights or remaining silent will make them appear guilty. We tested whether such a Miranda penalty exists.

We predicted that people would perceive suspects who invoke their Miranda rights or sit in silence during an interrogation as more likely to be guilty than those who waive their Miranda rights.

In two experiments, undergraduate psychology students (Experiment 1; N = 256) and students enrolled in law-enforcement-related degree programs (Experiment 2; N = 119) were instructed to play the role of a police officer investigating a series of crimes in which the suspect invoked his Miranda rights, sat in silence, or spoke to police. Participants evaluated each suspect along various characteristics (e.g., honest, suspicious), assessed his likely guilt, and reported how many hours they would allocate to investigating the suspect versus other potential suspects.

Suspects who invoked their right to silence or remained silent, compared with those who waived their rights and spoke to police, were perceived more negatively and judged as guiltier. Participants also allocated more hours toward investigating such suspects.

The protective power of Miranda is eroded by the tendency for people to infer guilt from a suspect's decision to invoke Miranda or remain silent during police interrogation. This Miranda penalty violates suspects' legal protection from being penalized for exercising their constitutional rights against self-incrimination and may bias the investigation and prosecution of criminal suspects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).