For John, BLUF: Public safety first, Miranda second.
One of the questions with regard to the Boston Marathon bombing and the capture of the suspect is whether, to quickly obtain information related to public safety (are there other bombs or are there other bombers), the suspect, Mr Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, of Cambridge, will not be Mirandized initially, but just questioned before he lawyers up. Here is one person's comments on this issue:
If you think you already have a good case, and are very worried about the possibility of other imminent threats, then you would take his statements without Mirandizing.However, the public safety side of the coin doesn't mean that all evidence will necessarily be excluded. The US Supreme Court has held that there is a narrow public safety exception to Miranda, NEW YORK v QUARLES. In this case a suspect appeared to have ditched a gun in a grocery store and the policeman wanted to know where the gun was, before there was additional problems:If I wanted to be sure you could get all his statements into the court record, then you would Mirandize.
It's hard to know what they will do, but if there's no Miranda warning, it's a sign that they're either very confident of a conviction on the evidence they have, very worried about other threats, or both.
Procedural safeguards that deter a suspect from responding, and increase the possibility of fewer convictions, were deemed acceptable in Miranda in order to protect the Fifth Amendment privilege against compulsory self-incrimination. However, if Miranda warnings had deterred responses to Officer Kraft's question about the whereabouts of the gun, the cost would have been something more than merely the failure to obtain evidence useful in convicting respondent. An answer was needed to insure that future danger to the public did not result from the concealment of the gun in a public area.It is the US Supreme Court, so of course there are differences. The opinion was delivered by Justice Rehnquist, concurred in by Chief Justice Burger and Justices White, Blackmun and Powell. Justice O'Connor concurred in part and Justices Marshall, Brennan and Stevens dissented.
I hope they err on the side of public safety. Evidence abounds. Besides, the United States Attorney is Carmen Ortiz, who will be charging him with everything under the sun, including "picking his feet in Poughkeepsie".
Regards — Cliff
I am somewhat troubled by the conflict in who "owns" the case. Of course Ortiz has LEAPED into the breach.....more likely motivated by a once in a lifetime opportunity than mere justice.
ReplyDeleteBut here's the rub. In a never ending movement to displace states rights with those of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Federal government, more often that not there will be a Federal statute that is, in essence" the same as statutes of the states. But when it comes to power politics.....Federal trumps states every time.
And thus, our own legal "system" acknowledges by its very actions that states are largely impotent in matters of this "Magnitude" I use that term to refer more to the political exposure rather than the obscenity of the crime.
There is no way on God's green earth that the Middlesex County DA will be involved in any of this. In fact, note the absence of that attorney in all of the "group photo ops."
But, where did the crime occur? I think "jury of his peers" must certainly derive to some extent....folks who live locally. I reject the notion that someone from TX is a "peer" of someone from Boston.
Soon enough, state's rights will have no meaning, or utility. Rather, for the time being, each state will simply exist as an agent of the Federal government.
Surely....the Founders must be in tears.