Suppose that your child is being held in a secret location by kidnappers who threaten to kill her within two hours unless they’re paid a ransom of $100,000 that you can’t raise. Suppose further that the FBI has just captured one of the kidnappers.
Would you want the agents to say this?
“You have the right to remain silent. If you give up the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you desire an attorney and cannot afford one, an attorney will be obtained for you before police questioning.”
And would you want them to stop asking questions the second the suspect asks for a lawyer?
Neither the Fifth Amendment nor Miranda forbids aggressive interrogation to protect public safety.
Now imagine a more realistic scenario, along the lines of Al Qaeda’s aborted 1995 “Bojinka” plot: After learning that Qaeda terrorists with virtually undetectable bombs are planning to blow up 12 airliners carrying almost 4,000 passengers very soon, the FBI captures one of them. Would you want him Mirandized?
The questions answer themselves.
Reasonable people disagree about how much coercion interrogators should use to extract potentially lifesaving information from terrorists. (None at all, President Obama unwisely ordered soon after taking office.)
But no reasonable person could doubt that starting out with “you have the right to remain silent” is not the way to save lives.
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I think this is a good read for law enforcement officers as well as prosecuting attorneys.
Those who beat their swords into plow shares end up plowing for those who kept their swords.
mid island mike
Re#2 — Agreed. I could go on here about reading rights to a jerk in the back of my car while he was all screwed up and not paying attention. Never used the info in court to the best of my knowledge but my questions buried them in other ways as I gained investigative leads.
The author is correct.
What I loved was when the defense argued that the accused was too drunk to understand the BTA demand or the warning, but wasn’t impaired for the purpose of driving.
mid island mike
I remember when the RCMP issued the first “warning card” with the Canadian version of the Miranda warning on it. It was a single card with the “you need not say anything” on one side and the BTA demand on the other side… about the same size as a business card.
We went down to the local problem bar and propped up the first drunk we could find (it wasn’t hard) and carefully read to him about his right to remain silent… He was impressed…
Nowadays, the warning card has evolved into a folded thing with three times as much info…
“Suppose that your child is being held in a secret location by kidnappers who threaten to kill her within two hours unless they’re paid a ransom of $100,000 that you can’t raise. Suppose further that the FBI has just captured one of the kidnappers”.
Easy solution, turn the SOB over to that child’s father. He’s be singing like a canary in about 30 seconds flat. I won’t put on paper what I personally would be willing to do to the scumbag to make him talk if it was my own daughter. He’d quickly believe that had just come face to face with Satan himself.
I’m not sure the father would have the ability to objectively handle the situation and would likely unintentionally kill the perp before he got the info he needed.
mid island mike.
Nazi terrorists were quickly executed after WWII.
Knowing that if the perp dies prematurely so will your daughter would I think sufficiently restrain a father from taking the ‘interrogation’ that one step too far.