Ernest Miranda

Ernesto Arturo Miranda was born in 1940 and grew up in Mesa, Arizona. He was called Ernie as a youth but went by Ernest as an adult. He was the fifth son of Manuel A. Miranda, a house painter who had immigrated to the United States from Sonora, Mexico, as a child. Ernie's mother died when he was five years old and his father remarried the following year. Ernie did not develop a close relationship with his stepmother and drifted apart from his father and older brothers.

Ernest Miranda. (AP/Wide World Photos)

Miranda was absent from the Queen of Peace Grammar School as often as he attended, and by eighth grade he had dropped out of school entirely. He was detained that year for felony car theft and put on probation. The following year Miranda was arrested for burglary and sent to Arizona State Industrial School for Boys at Fort Grant. He was released in December 1955 only to be sent back to Fort Grant in January 1956. This time he was arrested for attempted rape and assault.

When he was released a year later, Miranda moved to Los Angeles. By the fall of 1957 the teenager found himself imprisoned for the third time in less than three years when he was picked up on suspicion of armed robbery and placed in the custody of the California Youth Authority. Upon his release Miranda was sent to Arizona where he joined the U.S. Army in April 1958.

Miranda soon went AWOL (absent without approved leave) and was caught in a "peeping Tom" charge (watching someone without their knowledge). This earned him six months of hard labor in the military post stockade at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He received an undesirable discharge in July of 1959 at the age of nineteen.