Association for Political and Legal Anthropology

American Ethnological Society

Cosponsored - Oral Presentation Session

Dit Accompli: Non-Native Speakers in US Police Encounters, with special reference to Miranda

Presenter(s)

• NM

  Norma Mendoza-Denton

  Professor
  University of California, Los Angeles

This paper reviews the legal case of Miranda v. Arizona 1966 (commonly known as the case that established the Miranda Warning) and major challenges to it. Conclusions range over 20 cases brought before appellate courts where Miranda rights waivers were disputed by non-native speakers of English. In 13/20 of those cases the waivers were upheld. I postulate dit accompli speech acts to explain the shifting domain of Miranda jurisdiction, and contribute to understandings of linguistic entrapment of NNS (Mendoza-Denton 2016).