Case Background

The case of Ernesto Arturo Miranda seemed pretty straight forward: in March of 1963, arrested for robbery, he eventually confessed, additionally, to the rape of an eighteen year old girl two days prior to the initial alledged charge. This confession, along with positive identification of Miranda by the indicated victim, led to his conviction and sentencing of 20 to 30 years--on the charges of both kidnapping and rape, to be served concurrently.
Despite his guilt being both evident and clear, however, there was a legal trip-up that his court appointed lawyer, Alvin Moore, made note of and thus made use of in appealing to the Arizona Supreme court: Ernesto Miranda never had a lawyer present during his interrogation, nor was he informed of his fifth ammendment rights after self-incrimination. The Arizona Supreme court upheld the initial ruling, stating that Miranda had not requested an attorney--and so, the case was appealed again, this time to the federal Supreme Court.
One of the reasons this case came to be is due to the 1960s legal aid movement, which was mostly concerned with the overly manipulative and at times abusive methods used by police to secure confessions--methods which, in the case of a guilty suspect, do not respect that suspects rights to fair process, or, in the case of an innocent suspect, may render an inaccurate or false confession due to the pressures applied in a police-controlled environment. These tactics were referred to as the "third degree", denoted by wikipedia as being "a euphemism for the 'inflicting of pain, physical or mental, to extract confessions or statements'", the use of which was wide-spread especially during the 1930s--the origins or slang connotations/reference of the term is unknown, however, with various theories surrounding it.