Thurgood Marshall wrote a strong dissent in the Quarles case [View all]

[suffragette]

It's worth keeping in mind that the Quarles case was a conservative decision and the liberals on the court dissented.
Justice Marshall specifically pointed to the decision as "limiting the protections of the Fifth Amendment ."

Some excerpts from Justice Marshall's dissent:

http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/467/649/case.html


III
Though unfortunate, the difficulty of administering the "public safety" exception is not the most profound flaw in the majority's decision. The majority has lost sight of the fact that Miranda v. Arizona and our earlier custodial interrogation cases all implemented a constitutional privilege against self-incrimination. The rules established in these cases were designed to protect criminal defendants against prosecutions based on coerced self-incriminating statements. The majority today turns its back on these constitutional considerations,
Page 467 U. S. 681
and invites the government to prosecute through the use of what necessarily are coerced statements.
A
The majority's error stems from a serious misunderstanding of Miranda v. Arizona and of the Fifth Amendment upon which that decision was based. The majority implies that Miranda consisted of no more than a judicial balancing act in which the benefits of "enlarged protection for the Fifth Amendment privilege" were weighed against "the cost to society in terms of fewer convictions of guilty suspects." Ante at 467 U. S. 656-657. Supposedly because the scales tipped in favor of the privilege against self-incrimination, the Miranda Court erected a prophylactic barrier around statements made during custodial interrogations. The majority now proposes to return to the scales of social utility to calculate whether Miranda's prophylactic rule remains cost-effective when threats to the public's safety are added to the balance. The results of the majority's "test" are announced with pseudoscientific precision:
"We conclude that the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination."
Ante at 467 U. S. 657.
The majority misreads Miranda. Though the Miranda dissent prophesized dire consequences, see 384 U.S. at 384 U. S. 504, 384 U. S. 516-517 (Harlan, J., dissenting), the Miranda Court refused to allow such concerns to weaken the protections of the Constitution:
"A recurrent argument made in these cases is that society's need for interrogation outweighs the privilege. This argument is not unfamiliar to this Court. The whole thrust of our foregoing discussion demonstrates that the Constitution has prescribed the rights of the individual when confronted with the power of government
Page 467 U. S. 682
when it provided in the Fifth Amendment that an individual cannot be compelled to be a witness against himself. That right cannot be abridged."


~~~


The Fifth Amendment prohibits compelled self-incrimination. [Footnote 3/10] As the Court has explained on numerous occasions, this prohibition is the mainstay of our adversarial system of criminal justice. Not only does it protect us against the inherent unreliability of compelled testimony, but it also ensures that criminal investigations will be conducted with integrity, and that the judiciary will avoid the taint of official lawlessness. See Murphy
Page 467 U. S. 688
v. Waterfront Comm'n, 378 U. S. 52, 378 U. S. 55 (1964). The policies underlying the Fifth Amendment's privilege against self-incrimination are not diminished simply because testimony is compelled to protect the public's safety. The majority should not be permitted to elude the Amendment's absolute prohibition simply by calculating special costs that arise when the public's safety is at issue. Indeed, were constitutional adjudication always conducted in such an ad hoc manner, the Bill of Rights would be a most unreliable protector of individual liberties.