Nathaniel Burney [Associate, Quadrino Schwartz]: "If you are under arrest, and the police are interrogating you, they have to stop questioning when you ask to speak with a lawyer. So long as you remain in custody, they can't keep asking you to waive your right to have a lawyer present. That's coercive. Like the other Miranda rules, this rule helps ensure that the government doesn't extract a confession from you against your own free will. But what if you've been released from custody – do the Miranda concerns go away? Can the police try again?

Last Wednesday, in the case of Maryland v. Shatzer, the Supreme Court ruled that they can. Once you've been released, the police can try to question you again, but only after 14 days have passed. This is a bright-line rule, intended to be easy for the police to follow, and for the courts to enforce. The Court's reasoning is that, after two weeks have gone by, any pressures from being at the mercy of the police will have dissipated, and your life will have gone back to normal. So if this time you waive your right to an attorney, then it's probably voluntary.

What does this mean for future Fifth Amendment claims? Not much, in most cases. Most suspects are not released when they ask for a lawyer. But for those few who do get released, they need to know that the police may very well try again to get a confession. So they may be taken back into custody, where the police will again ask for a waiver of the right to counsel during questioning.

But two weeks is a purely arbitrary cutoff. For some people, 14 days is not long enough to shake off the stress and pressure of having been in custody. So for them, any new request is still going to be coercive. Other, more resilient suspects may not feel coerced the first time, but the police could just play "catch and release" every couple of weeks until the suspect gives in and talks without a lawyer. In these and other individual circumstances, however, defendants will always be free to argue that their waiver was involuntary. The new rule is only a presumption – and nothing more – that a waiver is voluntary after 14 days went by. If a defendant's free will was overridden by the police, that is always going to be an argument to get a confession suppressed."