Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights

Orin Kerr explains in Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights "The police aren’t required to follow Miranda. Miranda is a set of rules the government can chose to follow if they want to admit a person’s statements in a criminal case in court, not a set of rules they have to follow in every case."

"Chavez holds that a person’s Miranda rights are violated only if the statement is admitted in court, even if the statement is obtained in violation of Miranda...Further, the prosecution is even allowed to admit any physical evidence discovered as a fruit of the statement obtained in violation of Miranda — only the actual statement can be excluded."

There is an exemption to Miranda, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Miranda Rights: The public safety exception and terrorism cases "There is one specific circumstance in which it makes sense to hold off on Miranda. It’s exactly what the name of the exception suggests. The police can interrogate a suspect without offering him the benefit of Miranda if he could have information that’s of urgent concern for public safety." She goes on to give a nice history of the exemption and the rulings that define it.

Scott Lemieux explains another reason Why Tsarnaev Should Be Read His Miranda Rights. "Miranda does not require us to be indifferent about the distinction between coercive and non-coercive interrogations, and indeed its logic suggests that we shouldn’t be...the intent of the rule was to inhibit coercive interrogations, because coercive interrogations were both wrong in themselves and produced unreliable information."

"To refuse to inform Tsarnaev of his rights — outside of the acknowledged emergency exception to Miranda — sends the opposite message. It’s the message of the previous administration — i.e. that the rule of law and the “war on terror” are incompatible, that slapping the label “terrorist” on a suspect means that professional procedures that respect the rights of the accused can’t work. This isn’t right — it’s wrong in terms of the values it represents and it’s wrong in terms of the underlying assumption that less respect for the rights of the accused means more effective crime control."

And of course Glenn Greenwald talks about What rights should Dzhokhar Tsarnaev get and why does it matter? "First, the Obama administration has already rolled back Miranda rights for terrorism suspects captured on US soil. It did so two years ago with almost no controversy or even notice, including from many of those who so vocally condemned Graham's Miranda tweets yesterday."

He goes on. "It is bizarre indeed to watch Democrats act as though Graham's theories are exotic or repellent. This is, after all, the same faction that insists that Obama has the power to target even US citizens for execution without charges, lawyers, or any due process, on the ground that anyone the president accuses of Terrorism forfeits those rights. The only way one can believe this is by embracing the same theory that Lindsey Graham is espousing: namely, that accused Terrorists are enemy combatants, not criminals, and thus entitled to no due process and other guarantees in the Bill of Rights. Once you adopt this "entire-globe-is-a-battlefield" war paradigm - as supporters of Obama's assassination powers must do and have explicitly done - then it's impossible to scorn Graham's views about what should be done with Tsarnaev."

I'll just say, I'm not in the "same faction"