Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Burger Court limited the scope of Miranda v. Arizona. In Dickerson v. United States (2000), the Rehnquist Court could have halted Miranda altogether. Dickerson involved Section 3501 of the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968, which stated that a confession "shall be admissible in evidence if it is voluntarily given." This statute, enacted two years after Miranda was decided, did not require that the suspect be informed of his rights. Dickerson v. United States considered whether Section 3501 was constitutional. Ultimately, three conservative members of the Court — Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices O'Connor and Kennedy — voted to stand by that landmark precedent. Indeed, these three had previously found that Miranda was wrongly decided.
Justice Scalia dissented, joined by Justice Thomas. They contended that Miranda was not a "constitutional rule" — whatever that is. But more importantly, they identified the limitation of Chief Justice Rehnquist's majority opinion:
One will search today's opinion in vain, however, for a statement (surely simple enough to make) that what 18 U.S.C. §3501 prescribes — the use at trial of a voluntary confession, even when a Miranda warning or its equivalent has failed to be given — violates the Constitution. The reason the statement does not appear is not only (and perhaps not so much) that it would be absurd, inasmuch as §3501 excludes from trial precisely what the Constitution excludes from trial, viz., compelled confessions; but also that Justices whose votes are needed to compose today's majority are on record as believing that a violation of Miranda is not a violation of the Constitution.
