- One wishes that the ardent advocates for the rights of suspected terrorist would read the Fourth Amendment, which captures very well the balance the Constitution calls for. Unlike the one-sided, absolute language of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law…”), the Fourth protects “against unreasonable searches and seizures,” thus recognizing on the face of it that there are reasonable searches—that is, those justified by a compelling public interest.
Except that the 1984 public safety exception is less about protecting the public from the possibility of a threat that can happen within days and more about protecting officers from dangers that can happen within minutes. Say that they had discovered that a bomb was planted and had found Tsarnaev. There's 5 minutes to detonate, and they manage to arrest him. At that moment they could ignore his Miranda rights and question him since the bomb has not yet been dedicated and they don't know its location; in that case, reading him his Miranda rights will cause danger to the public in a very direct and measurable manner. When you start to expand upon the public safety law, it makes the boundaries very unclear. How far out does it extend? Is it days? Weeks? Hours? We could probably accept hours, but what if the bomb was just a vague threat? Do we deny rights based off of "what ifs" or are we going to suspend rights based on hard evidence that can be quantified. Yes, taking the route of evidence and factual observation is hard. It will cost more lives than if you take every suspect and hold them for questioning without worrying about the consequences. Yet we all understand that at times the life of an individual, even a decent sized group of people, is not worth the greater good. The loss of a human life is something should be avoided, but when you attempt to prevent it at the cost of the rights of the living, you are not treating the dead with maturity and respect. Life comes to an end. It is the nature of the world. Sometimes that end is peaceful, sometimes that end is violent. But if the reaction to death is to pull up a shell, to cut people off from the freedom they had been promised, then all you've done is degrade the world a little bit more in a vain attempt to avoid the inevitable.
Except that there is no legal requirement to read anyone their miranda rights ever, unless you want to admit what they say to a court of law. The "legal" coverage of this case has been abysmal. The media's coverage has enlightened the public neither on their rights or on the legal proceedings of the case. I understand that people might think that aspirationally we should read everyone their miranda rights, but laws and precedent do not actually mandate it. There is no reason to believe that the public safety exception has anything to do with the case at this point. The public safety exception is about admission of evidence, we are not at the discovery point in the trial at this point and consequntly have no idea if it will be invoked to admit evidence garnered from interrogating the suspect. If journalist and bloggers who write about legal issues merely read the wiki entry on Miranda they would say a lot less stupid stuff. The excellent Pope Hat blog is a good place to start, if anyone is curious what thier rights are. They have also been doing a good job of explaining other relavant and little understood aspects of the trial. It's almost like there is a conspiracy in the media to ill inform us all about miranda, but I always say "What it looks like conspiracy is usually just incompetence."