Justice STEVENS, with whom Justice MARSHALL and Justice BLACKMUN join, dissenting.
The Court's opinion demeans the importance of the right to counsel. As a practical matter, the opinion probably will have only a slight impact on current custodial interrogation procedures. As a theoretical matter, the Court's innovative development of an "offense-specific" limitation on the scope of the attorney-client relationship can only generate confusion in the law and undermine the protections that undergird our adversarial system of justice. As a symbolic matter, today's decision is ominous because it reflects a preference for an inquisitorial system that regards the defense lawyer as an impediment rather than a servant to the cause of justice.
* The predicate for the Court's entire analysis is the failure of the defendant at the preliminary hearing to make a "statement that can reasonably be construed to be expression of a desire for the assistance of an attorney in dealing with custodial interrogation by the police." Ante, at 178. If petitioner in this case had made such a statement indicating that he was invoking his Fifth Amendment right to counsel as well as his Sixth Amendment right to counsel, the entire offense-specific house of cards that the Court has erected today would collapse, pursuant to our holding in Arizona v. Roberson, 486 U.S. 675, 108 S.Ct. 2093, 100 L.Ed.2d 704 (1988), that a defendant who invokes the right to counsel for interrogation on one offense may not be reapproached regarding any offense unless counsel is present.
In future preliminary hearings, competent counsel can be expected to make sure that they, or their clients, make a statement on the record that will obviate the consequences of today's holding. That is why I think this decision will have little, if any, practical effect on police practices.
The outcome of this case is determined by the Court's parsimonious "offense-specific" description of the right to counsel guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment. The Court's definition is inconsistent with the high value our prior cases have placed on this right, with the ordinary understanding of the scope of the right, and with the accepted practice of the legal profession.
In Michigan v. Jackson, 475 U.S. 625, 106 S.Ct. 1404, 89 L.Ed.2d 631 (1986), we held that the defendant's invocation of his right to the assistance of counsel at arraignment prohibited the police from initiating a postarraignment custodial interrogation without notice to his lawyer. After explaining that our prior cases required us "to give a broad, rather than a narrow, interpretation to a defendant's request for counsel," we squarely rejected "the State's suggestion that respondents' requests for the appointment of counsel should be construed to apply only to representation in formal legal proceedings." Id., at 633, 106 S.Ct., at 1409. Instead, we noted that "it is the State that has the burden of establishing a valid waiver [of the right to counsel]. Doubts must be resolved in favor of protecting the constitutional claim." Ibid. (citation omitted).
Today, however, the Court accepts a narrow, rather than a broad, interpretation of the same right. It accepts the State's suggestion that although, under our prior holding in Michigan v. Jackson, a request for the assistance of counsel at a formal proceeding such as an arraignment constitutes an invocation of the right to counsel at police-initiated custodial interrogation as well, such a request only covers interrogation about the specific charge that has already been filed and for which the formal proceeding was held. Today's approach of construing ambiguous requests for counsel narrowly and presuming a waiver of rights is the opposite of that taken in Jackson.
The Court's holding today moreover rejects the common sense evaluation of the nature of an accused's request for counsel that we expressly endorsed in Jackson:
"We also agree with the comments of the Michigan Supreme Court about the nature of an accused's request for counsel: