There is an interesting debate about the legal rights of one of the accused Boston bombers. He has not been given his Miranda rights because Justice officials believe that there is an urgent need to gather intelligence and that an attorney present to defend the accused’s tights would compromise that need. Even more interesting is the demand of some Republicans that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev be treated as an enemy combatant. To label a domestic criminal in that manner without the slightest bit of evidence that the accused was an agent of a state means that the definition of “war” can be almost infinitely expandable to cover any act that “threatens” another state. We should be very careful before we enter that realm: the Constitution doesn’t really operate all that well in a time of war.
Change comes to the world in a variety of ways, but cultural change is without doubt the most important of all the sources of change. A new book, How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin. chronicles how rock and roll chaanged and undermined the USSR. This review is from The Guardian, and I can’t wait to read the book this summer.
Barry Ritholz has reproduced some great economic graphs on the differences between rich and poor countries in their recoveries from the financial crisis on 2008-09. The conclusion? Poor countries are doing much better recovering from the crisis largely because they have not followed austerity policies. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned.
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I have been very distressed about the decision to deny Miranda rights to this suspect, as contemptible as he may be to many people of reason and goodwill, myself included. He is a naturalized citizen of the United States. He deserves to be afforded the rights that we all enjoy, regardless of the crime of which he is accused, and no matter how heinous that crime.
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I agree completely. An American citizen on American soil is not an ambiguous foreign national in a foreign “theater of war”. Rights are specified in order to protect citizens against the state; they are not created so that the state can protect itself against its own citizens–those are called laws, not rights.
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I agree that his miranda rights should’ve been introduced prior to his arrest simply because it is constitutional and in order with judicial proceedings, however, there is a clear line that the judicial department outlined in its defense of an absence of the miranda rights in the arrest of the suspected bomber and that is because of a “public safety exception.” What the Department of Defense claims is the public safety exception is that a threat that constituted fear and inflicted public safety distress following possible questions and concerns of a possible impeding terrorist attack makes it alright to void the usage of the miranda rights. I would be content with this, however, because there is not enough evidence gathered that the suspected bomber is indeed a terrorist or has affiliations with an international terrorist organization, denying the miranda rights seems too premature.
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