Reconsidering Miranda rights: Modeling strategic action during the invocation stage of a police interrogation.

This article develops a method, grounded in framing theory and hypergame theory, to identify manipulation of custodial suspects who attempt to invoke their Miranda right to legal counsel during police interrogations. It analyzes how interrogators (I) use strategic linguistic actions within a hypergame framework to shift suspects’ (CS) preferences from invoking counsel to waiving that right without explicit coercion, exploiting suspects’ failure to recognize the true form of the interaction ("failure of game form recognition"). Through detailed case excerpts, the paper illustrates two types of hypergames—initiated either by the suspect or the interrogator—that reveal how institutional power and asymmetrical knowledge enable interrogators to manipulate suspects’ perceptions and preferences, leading suspects to waive their rights voluntarily but under misleading conversational conditions. The study expands traditional game theory by integrating fluid preferences and perception-based shifts, providing a structured model to analyze manipulation in noncooperative discursive exchanges during the invocation stage of custodial interrogations.