In the case of Missouri v. Patrice Seibert, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2004 that a police protocol known as "question-first" violated the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. The "question-first" procedure involved interrogating suspects without reading them their Miranda rights, obtaining a confession, then reading them their rights and having them repeat their earlier confession. In this particular case, Patrice Seibert was convicted for her role in an arson plot that resulted in a teenager's death based on confessions obtained through this method by law enforcement officers. However, the Supreme Court held (in a 5-4 decision) that such confessions could not be used as evidence because they were obtained unconstitutionally under Miranda v Arizona precedent which requires authorities to inform individuals of their right to remain silent before questioning begins.

In the dissenting opinion for Missouri v. Seibert, Justice O'Connor argued that the majority's decision to suppress a confession obtained after an initial un-Mirandized interrogation was too broad and failed to consider whether or not the suspect knowingly waived their Miranda rights in subsequent interrogations. She contended that this ruling could potentially exclude voluntary confessions from being used as evidence, even when suspects are fully aware of their rights during later questioning sessions. Instead, she proposed a narrower rule: if police intentionally withhold Miranda warnings during an initial interrogation with plans to repeat it post-warning, then any resulting confession should be suppressed unless there is clear proof that the second session wasn't just a continuation of the first one and that it didn’t exploit what was learned in pre-warning questioning.