Chapter 5 provides a statistical analysis of the legal rulings that comprise the book’s corpus. The analysis looks at the possible relationships between the variables that make up the corpus, including types of invocations for counsel, types of suspects (e.g., juveniles, L2 speakers), and the judges’ presidential appointments, among an array of other legal and linguistic factors, and the judges’ rulings on the legal standing of the suspects’ invocations for counsel. To frame the discussion and understand the seeming disconnect between suspects’ invocations for counsel and the application of the law, the chapter provides a description of the corpus, the entry and selection of variables, and the research questions posed. The findings of the analysis provide further evidence of the effect of judicial rulings on the suspects/defendants’ legal journey. Given the potential significant role of suspects’ statements in the conviction of a crime, this chapter also includes a discussion on whether a ruling that suppresses such statements is enough to reverse a lower court’s ruling on the use of such statements and/or its content in court.

Chapter 2 explores how law enforcement’s ability to engage discursively with suspects and other lay persons is limited by the law. Judicial rulings regarding suspects’ rights during custodial interrogation, such as the right to counsel, provide insights into how the United States federal court system, led by the main court of the land the Supreme Court of the United States, views suspects’ constitutional rights, on the one hand, and the societal benefit of police officers being able to conduct criminal investigations, on the other. The chapter discusses the evolution of the right to counsel in the federal courts, since the seminal Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruling, and the insights this history provides in framing the law as a facilitator or, alternatively, a deterrent to suspects invoking their right to counsel, prior to the onset of custodial interrogation. This analysis of opinions from the Court, circuit courts, district courts, and a few military courts, that make up the book’s corpus, will shed light on how judges have viewed the role of police in society, through time, and whether some in the judiciary consider the Miranda ruling as overreaching in its ‘intended’ constitutional protections.