In a unanimous decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that police officers must read K-12 students their Miranda rights before interrogating them in a school setting. 

The case stems from an incident at a Two Rivers middle school in which a 12-year-old seventh grade student, referred to in the case under the pseudonym Kevin, touched the groin of a classmate. Kevin was pulled out of class to be interviewed in a small room dedicated for use by school resource officers. After an initial interview around 10 minutes, Kevin was allowed to leave before being interviewed again about an hour later by the officers and a vice principal. The boy was not able to call his parents and was not informed he was allowed to leave the room. 

While he was in the room, a uniformed officer stood in front of the door and the school resource officer doing the interview lied by saying there were witnesses to the incident. Police officers are allowed to lie during interviews to elicit a confession. 

Kevin said during both interviews that he had touched the boy’s groin but that it was an accident. 

Kevin was later charged with fourth-degree sexual assault and in a bench trial was found delinquent by a Manitowoc County Circuit Court judge. 

The boy appealed the ruling, arguing that the statements he made during the interview were inadmissible because he had not been read his Miranda rights. 

In the majority decision, authored by Justice Janet Protasiewicz and joined by the Court’s three other liberal-leaning justices, the Court found that taking Kevin to the room for questioning amounted to being in police custody and he should have been read his rights. 

The ruling found that the interview statements weren’t admissible. However it also found that the evidence for the delinquency finding did not rely on the statements so the circuit judge’s decision was upheld. 

“While Kevin sat across from one officer who questioned him, another fully uniformed and armed officer stood positioned in front of the door. The questioning officer asked him about an alleged sexual assault. She told him — untruthfully — that there were witnesses,” Protasiewicz wrote. “She also accusingly told him ‘it happened.’ No one told him he could reach out to his parents or any other adult. No one told him he was free to leave. No one told him he did not need to answer questions.” 

“But in the end, a 12-year-old boy was questioned in a closet-like law-enforcement office with two police officers, one who was fully uniformed and standing in front of the door,” she continued. 

Ryan Cox, the legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, which filed an amicus brief in the case, said the ruling would protect the constitutional rights of children.

“The Supreme Court’s decision is a major victory for the due process rights of Wisconsin students,” Cox said in a statement to the Wisconsin Examiner. “The ruling means that, in deciding whether a student must be read their Miranda rights during a police interrogation in a school setting, Wisconsin courts must consider the reasons why a child in the student’s position would feel coerced and not free to leave. This decision upholds students’ Fifth Amendment right to protect themselves against self-incrimination during encounters with law enforcement. Students retain their constitutional rights, including the right to remain silent and seek counsel when interacting with law enforcement, even in the school environment. Police are not exempt from their responsibilities to uphold the rights of a person simply because the student is a minor in a school environment. The Court affirmed this fundamental principle and protected Wisconsin students across the state from coercive and unconstitutional police conduct.”

In a concurring opinion joined by the other two conservative leaning justices, Justice Brian Hagedorn said the issue was made larger than it should have been, writing that the majority transformed “a rather ordinary schoolhouse questioning” into a matter of constitutional import. 

Hagedorn wrote that a seventh grader would likely see being questioned by police as intimidating but recognize that school resource officers are trusted parts of the school community. 

“Would a reasonable 12-year-old in this situation feel some pressure? Absolutely. But was this the kind of hostile, inherently coercive questioning that animated the court in Miranda? It was not,” Hagedorn wrote. “A reasonable person in Kevin’s position would not see SROs as unfamiliar and antagonistic adults. The reasonable person would see them as dedicated and familiar faces — intimidating to be sure — but nonetheless present to keep everyone safe.” 

Communities across Wisconsin have had fights over the presence of school resource officers for years. Officers were removed from Milwaukee Public Schools in 2016 at the request of community members, but returned last year by state legislators under a provision of a law providing local governments with increased state financial support. Opponents of SROs have argued the presence of cops in schools makes Black students in particular targets of inappropriate monitoring at school, which is supposed to be a safe place for them to learn. 

In his opinion, Hagedorn wrote that the ruling was a close call but that he wanted to distinguish between a true police interrogation and the normal functions of school discipline. 

“These facts give some support to the idea that a reasonable person in Kevin’s situation would have felt pressured to confess,” Hagedorn wrote. “Under my read of the cases, however, more is required to approximate the coercive environment at issue in Miranda. Someone in Kevin’s shoes would certainly feel the weight of adult condemnation. His conscience might even call him to come clean in the face of a serious infraction. But this normal human experience should not so quickly be placed on par with the uniquely coercive station house questioning to which Miranda applies.”

Liberal members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court said they were “shocked” at the ramifications of the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s arguments against a grant program meant to help prevent minority students from dropping out of technical college. 

The Court on Wednesday held oral arguments in a case that began in a 2021 lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court. The suit alleges that the state’s Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant program, administered by the Higher Education Aids Board, unlawfully discriminates based on race. 

The program, established in the 1980s, provides small-dollar grants to Black, Native American and Hispanic students, as well as Southeast Asians who came to the U.S. from Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam after 1975. On average, members of these groups drop out of school or fail to graduate at substantially higher rates than their peers, the state has argued. 

The program has been a frequent target of Wisconsin Republicans in recent years — especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended the legality of affirmative action in college admissions. 

The Wisconsin Examiner previously reported that money through the program has largely been used to assist Black students at Milwaukee Area Technical College. 

In a decision last year, the 2nd District Court of Appeals sided with WILL and the taxpayers it is representing, declaring the program unconstitutional. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul appealed the decision and in November the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. 

WILL attorney Luke Berg argued Wednesday that any program that targets specific racial groups is unconstitutional — regardless of whether those groups face statistical disparities. 

“I think the worst form of discrimination is discrimination under the law, when the law treats individuals differently based on their race,” Berg said. “I’m not asking the Court to ignore that there are disparities in statistics, and I think we should all be concerned about that. But there are poor white students, there are poor Asian students, there are poor Afghani students, there are poor Palestinian students, there are poor Egyptian students.” 

“It cannot have explicit race discrimination under the law,” he continued later. “It can target racially neutral criteria like poverty, and it can solve those disparities indirectly. Give the scholarship to every student that needs it. If there are more poor Black students, more of them will get that scholarship.”

Several of the Court’s left-leaning justices pushed back on Berg’s comments, questioning how ignoring race-based statistical gaps achieves the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection. Justice Jill Karofsky told him, “your argument basically asks us to stick our heads in the sand.” 

Justice Rebecca Dallet noted that in Wisconsin, Black mothers and babies face much higher rates of health issues and under Berg’s legal construction, the state couldn’t do anything to specifically target that problem. 

“If the purpose is to help Black babies live who are not living at the same rate as white babies. How would they do that without mentioning the word Black?” Dallet said.

Berg responded that the state could pass a program that applies to “all babies” because “there are some white babies in the world who might need that program, too, and so you would make the program available to all.” 

“That is shocking, and if that’s what our U.S. Supreme Court wants to say, that is shocking, but I don’t think that that’s what they said in SFFA,” Dallet responded. 

Charlotte Gibson, the Department of Justice attorney arguing on behalf of the HEAB, called the appeals court’s decision “radical” saying that it went further than the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to end affirmative action. 

“The court of appeals decision was radical,” Gibson said. “I’m not aware of any court in the country that has come up with a ban this categorical that would impact things like medical research that’s targeted a particular racial group that’s suffering from specific health outcomes. But … that’s exactly what the rule of law they’re looking for would do.”

Berg opened his arguments to the Court saying he believed the justices should dismiss the case and accept the appeals court’s decision. He argued that if the Court sides with the state, an appeal will immediately be filed in federal court. 

“If this court reverses, either on standing or the merits, the next thing that will happen is someone will file this case in federal court, us or somebody else,” Berg said. “It may be a race to the courthouse, because this is, like I said, the lowest of low hanging fruit in terms of federal claims … So what will happen is the taxpayers will pay for this court’s time. The taxpayers will pay for their time to litigate the case again for three to four years. The taxpayers will pay the time [of] federal district court counsel.”

Justices Susan Crawford, Janet Protasiewicz and Dallet objected, saying they took his comments as a “threat.” 

“That is such an inappropriate argument. It is so inappropriate and disrespectful to the state and their program that they are here to argue in front of us, it’s basically a threat to us,” Dallet said.