O’Connor, J., dissenting
ing constitutional analysis on a police officer's subjective intent, an unattractive proposition that we all but uniformly avoid. In general, "we believe that 'sending state and federal courts on an expedition into the minds of police officers would produce a grave and fruitless misallocation of judicial resources.'" United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 922, n. 23 (1984) (quoting Massachusetts v. Painten, 389 U.S. 560, 565 (1968) (White, J., dissenting)). This case presents the uncommonly straightforward circumstance of an officer openly admitting that the violation was intentional. But the inquiry will be complicated in other situations probably more likely to occur. For example, different officers involved in an interrogation might claim different states of mind regarding the failure to give Miranda warnings. Even in the simple case of a single officer who claims that a failure to give Miranda warnings was inadvertent, the likelihood of error will be high. See W. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 1.4(e), p. 124 (3d ed. 1996) ("[T]here is no reason to believe that courts can with any degree of success determine in which instances the police had an ulterior motive").
These evidentiary difficulties have led us to reject an intent-based test in several criminal procedure contexts. For example, in New York v. Quarles, one of the factors that led us to reject an inquiry into the subjective intent of the police officer in crafting a test for the "public safety" exception to Miranda was that officers' motives will be "largely unverifiable." 467 U.S., at 656. Similarly, our opinion in Whren v. United States, 517 U.S. 806, 813–814 (1996), made clear that "the evidentiary difficulty of establishing subjective intent" was one of the reasons (albeit not the principal one) for refusing to consider intent in Fourth Amendment challenges generally.
For these reasons, I believe that the approach espoused by Justice Kennedy is ill advised. Justice Kennedy would extend Miranda's exclusionary rule to any case in which the use of the "two step interrogation technique" was "deliber-
