For example, the whole Miranda rights thing came from a Supreme Court decision from 1966, not a law passed by Congress.
As a hypothetical example, imagine a court 50 years ago said that talking to the police after invoking your 5th Amendment rights nullified your invocation of your rights.
Then, a case appears where a suspect wasn't read his Miranda rights but had invoked the 5th, except he then spoke to the police immediately after (and nullified his previous invocation). Well, what if the court decides he can re-invoke his 5th Amendment rights once he's finally read his Miranda rights? Boom. More precedence.
See how it can get complicated? It's almost kind of like when you have to write a bunch of edge-case code because weird "gotchas" keep cropping up and it's a bitch to rewrite the entire thing.
This process btw is how USA effectively got software patents.
A corporation or other applied for a patent on a production process that used a computer (and therefore software) to gain more precise control of the results than previous mechanical means.
The patent holder was sued over it, and a judge ruled in the patent holders favor.
This ruling was then used by other lawyers to press for "process" patents, where the process was described in software.
And so far no higher court has overruled the initial ruling, thus effectively USA have software patents.
Judges on the same tier are not strictly bound, but in the interest of consistency (the law always seeks to be applied in the same way to the same situation), will look to the rulings of other courts on their level if no higher court has ruled. This is called persuasive precedent. The Supremes often take a case because the lower courts, (Circuit Courts of Appeals) have ruled differently on the same issue. This is called a circuit split.
Coming from a civil law country (where precedence does not play that much of a role) really makes these things hard to grasp normally.
It's worth remembering that Americans have generally a pretty solid right to avoid self-incrimination. In the UK, for instance, your silence can be used against you in court.
I think this happens a lot more with the 4th and 5th amendments because they're so politically dicey. Like, okay, the cops shouldn't have searched that parked car without a warrant, but now you're the judge who has to exclude the gloves spattered with the victim's blood they found in the trunk.
I think it's more complex for government, but still complex for the person being questioned. For instance, the chart notes that if you are granted immunity, you cannot leave a form blank or assert your right to remain silent in a blanket fashion.
A second way things are complicated in the Hiibel case, which requires you to speak to the police to say your name.
A third way is that suspects who assert their rights are sometimes treated worse by the police. The US has a storied history of police abuse, including torture (Jon Burge, for one). Occasionally, this is caught on video, and it sometimes seems that the reaction by the police is one of anger. Infuriating the police by asserting your rights may get you some non-judicial punishment, including "contempt-of-cop", in which the police assault you and then charge you with assault via, for instance, bleeding on their uniforms (Henry Davis). In unlucky cases, you may end up dead from "excited delirium", a disease almost exclusively suffered by those in police custody but out of range of video cameras.
I'm not sure about that. The government does this all the time - cops will know exactly where the lines are and how to get you to fuck up. They get daily practice in it.
Meanwhile, your average citizen likely doesn't know what the Fifth Amendment means beyond vague stuff they remember from high school, and there's a good chance they really don't know you have to explicitly state you're exercising it.
Is this on purpose? And why? What (ow who) makes such laws so complicated, that you seem to have to study law to maneuver through these minefields.