This project is designed to advance our theoretical and empirical knowledge of Miranda rights and warnings. An important aspect of the procedure is whether specific Miranda warnings meet the Court's requirement of clear and unequivocal language. Waiver of Miranda rights requires that custodial suspects can rationally apply these warnings to their own circumstances. One metric of understandability is level of reading comprehension required by specific Miranda warnings. The project examines the vocabulary complexity, sentence complexity, and Flesch-Kincaid grade equivalent for reading comprehension for Miranda warnings and individual Miranda statements across a broad range of U.S. jurisdictions at the state and federal levels.
