My thinking about Miranda has made me curious whether the warnings would work better if they were flipped around. Normally, they have always been read in this order:

1. You have the right to remain silent.
2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
3. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning.
4. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.

But I wonder how many people really understand what #1 is actually telling them. “You have the right to remain silent” is always read in a stern voice, by an authority figure, in a bad situation. I think for many years of my young life, if you asked me to explain what “you have the right to remain silent” meant, I would have told you that it meant “you had better be quiet!” Not because that would be good for your cause, but because you had been bad and now somebody was having to deal with you. It rings more of “you are in trouble, so you ought to shut up and listen” than of “you don’t have to say a damn thing to these cops, about anything, no matter how hard they try to make you talk.”

So what if police read the warnings this way, so that they began with an offer of help:

1. If you cannot afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.
2. And, in fact, you have the right to speak to a lawyer, and to have the lawyer present during any questioning.
3. Anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
4. But, you have the right to remain silent.

The current order precisely follows the logical steps of the Supreme Court’s legal reasoning in the Miranda opinion. That the original order has been preserved surely indicates that it is strategically advantageous to those who get to determine the order in the field—the police. This order, I’m afraid, has nothing to do with effectively communicating to a person under immense stress.