I’ve never cared for the Miranda Warning. We wouldn’t have it if it weren’t for the fact that there are some clucks in law enforcement – and that includes prosecutors – who in their eagerness to make a case and get a conviction, will disregard the Constitutional rights afforded a criminal defendant.
In the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I hesitate to criticize the DOJ or the judge who came in to advise him of his rights. The courts have ruled there is only a small amount of time a suspect can be questioned in terrorism cases before the Miranda Warning must be given. The rulings made no exception for a suspect who is hospitalized.
What we are talking about here is the Public Safety Exception to the Miranda Warning. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested April 19 and was not mirandized until April 22. Whether we like it or not, his Miranda rights started the moment he was taken into custody and that public safety exception time limit had been well exceeded before he was advised of his rights.
Furthermore, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz does not think the public safety exception even applies in this case. According to HuffPost, Dershowitz said that the government made a huge mistake by waiting so long to question Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “There was never a basis for the public safety exception. As you know, when they announced it, the police had already announced that the public safety danger was over, they had arrested everybody.”
Some members of Congress have said that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should have been declared an ‘enemy combatant’ so that Miranda would not apply in his case. However, some legal experts say we could not legally declare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an enemy combatant because he is a U.S. citizen who planned and committed his act within the U.S. and was captured within the U.S. Had we captured any of the 9/11 terrorists, we would have declared them enemy combatants because they were foreign nationals who planned their attacks outside the U.S., probably in Saudi Arabia, and came to the U.S. from the Middle East to carry out their plans.
HOLDER DEFENDS MIRANDIZING BOSTON BOMBING SUSPECT
By Todd Beamon
Newsmax
April 27, 2013
Attorney General Eric Holder on Saturday defended the decision to read the surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon terror bombings his Miranda rights.
Holder said the decision was “totally consistent with the laws that we have.”
He also pointed to the federal magistrate on the case.
“The decision to Mirandize was one that the magistrate made,” Holder told CNN as he arrived at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington.
Early on Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler showed up at the hospital unannounced with a federal prosecutor and public defender while the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was being questioned by the FBI.
He was under interrogation for about 16 hours when Bowler read him his Miranda rights, according to news reports. The FBI thought it had 36 to 48 hours to question Tsarnaev under the pre-Miranda public-safety exemption.
The 19-year-old suspect was arrested four days after the April 15 blasts and was transferred on Friday to Federal Medical Center Devens, an all-male prison outside Boston.
Tsarnaev is being treated for gunshot wounds to the neck and leg sustained in a fierce shootout with police earlier on April 19 that killed his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan.
“We had a two-day period under where authorities questioned him under the public-safety exception,” Holder told CNN on Saturday, referring to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. “Everything was done appropriately, and we got good leads.”
The attorney general also declined to comment on reports that Russian authorities secretly recorded a telephone conversation in 2011 in which Tamerlan vaguely discussed jihad with his mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva.
She also was recorded talking to someone in southern Russia who is under FBI investigation in an unrelated case, officials told The Associated Press on Saturday.
The conversations are significant because, had they been revealed earlier, the FBI might have had enough evidence to initiate a more thorough investigation of the Tsarnaev family.
The Tsarnaevs are ethnic Chechens who emigrated from southern Russia to the Boston area over the past 11 years.
No comments:
Post a Comment