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Rehnquist scaled back rights of the accused.

Article Excerpt
In 1969, when William Rehnquist was the assistant attorney general for the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, he wrote a memorandum to John Dean, then associate deputy attorney general, opining that "the Supreme Court has failed to hold true the balance between the right of society to convict the guilty and the obligation of society to safeguard the accused." He specifically complained about Miranda v. Arizona, (1) the Fourth Amendment's exclusionary rule, and the rise in habeas corpus petitions. He urged the creation of a commission "to determine whether the overriding public interest in law enforcement ... requires a constitutional amendment." (2)

By 1985, thirteen years after his precipitous elevation to the Supreme Court, Rehnquist said he was pleased that the Court had "called a halt to a number of the sweeping rulings [of] the Warren Court" in "the area of constitutional rights of accused criminal defendants." (3) However, he had not met his goals of overruling Mapp v. Ohio's application of the exclusionary rule to the states (4) and Miranda. Then, in 2000, he wrote the majority opinion in Dickerson v. United States, reaffirming Miranda's constitutional status. (5)

Had Rehnquist succeeded in convincing his colleagues that Mapp and Miranda should be overruled, he would have essentially undone all the work of the Warren Court. Without the exclusionary remedy in place, as the Court had observed in Mapp, police would have no incentive to follow Supreme Court rules for searches or interrogations, and the entire structure of federally mandated "rules" of criminal procedure would have come crashing down. In theory, the states would still have to follow Supreme Court Fourth and Fifth Amendment rules because Rehnquist never argued that the Fourteenth Amendment should not make those amendments applicable to the states. But in practice, since only state police behavior that "shocked the conscience" would lead to federally mandated exclusion, (6) the states would basically be free to do what they wanted about other constitutional violations.

While Rehnquist failed in his effort to radically reconstruct criminal procedure law, he nevertheless enjoyed perhaps his greatest success in his 33 years on the Court by trimming back Warren Court initiatives in virtually every area of criminal procedure and habeas corpus.

Rehnquist joined the Court on the day when it achieved a Republican majority, even though Rehnquist himself did not change the partisan balance. (7) Thus, he was able to "hit the ground running" when it came to attempting to achieve his ambitious agenda.

One important area in which the Court consistently cut back police powers was...

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