Illinois v. Perkins

Illinois v. Perkins
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 20, 1990 Decided June 4, 1990
Full case name	Illinois v. Perkins
Docket no.	88-1972
Citations	496 U.S. 292 (more)
Argument	Oral argument
Case history
Prior	motion to suppress granted April 1987, affirmed, People v. Perkins, 531 NE 2d 141 (1988), cert. granted, 493 U. S. 808 (1989)
Subsequent	motion to suppress granted on other grounds, 207 Ill.App.3d 1124, affirmed, People v. Perkins, 618 NE 2d 1275 (1993), rehearing denied September 1993, ibid.
Holding
Statements made by an incarcerated suspect to an undercover police agent are admissible as evidence, notwithstanding that the suspect was not given a Miranda warning, when the suspect did not know they were speaking to the police.
Court membership
Chief Justice William Rehnquist Associate Justices William J. Brennan Jr. · Byron White Thurgood Marshall · Harry Blackmun John P. Stevens · Sandra Day O'Connor Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy
Case opinions
Majority	Kennedy, joined by Rehnquist, White, Blackmun, Stevens, O'Connor, Scalia
Concurrence	Brennan
Dissent	Marshall
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. V

Illinois v. Perkins, 496 U.S. 292 (1990),^[1] was a decision by the United States Supreme Court that held that undercover police agents did not need to give Miranda warnings when talking to suspects in jail.^[2] Miranda warnings, named after the 1966 Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, are generally required when police interrogate suspects in custody in order to protect the right not to self-incriminate and the right to counsel under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.^[3] However, the Court ruled that potential coercion must be evaluated from the suspect's point of view, and if they are unaware that they are speaking to police, they are not under the coercive pressure of a normal interrogation.^[4]