Miranda seems an especially awkward fit for the Tsarnaev case. The public interest in pumping him for intelligence is high — to detect bombs elsewhere, to unravel a conspiracy and so on. Insisting on reading him his rights immediately anyway seems formalistic, to say the least.
Meanwhile, the government has little incentive to Mirandize Tsarnaev at all, given that the evidence against him seems overwhelming even without a confession. In this case, the Obama administration’s public-safety exception seems like a legalistic attempt to preserve the admissibility of evidence it might not even need. Yet invoking it may enshrine an exception far more expansive than the one created by the 1984 Supreme Court case upon which the administration’s legal theory rests. In that case, the interrogation consisted of immediately asking a hurriedly arrested rape suspect, “Where’s the gun?”
Maybe someday the Supreme Court will sort it all out, just as it has attempted to fit a host of other unforeseen applications into the Miranda paradigm over the years.
Wouldn’t it be better to achieve the necessary and legitimate purposes of Miranda through more efficient means? One alternative made possible by evolving technology would be to require video recording of all in-custody police questioning — to deter abuses and to let juries decide if a confession was voluntary.
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