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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It only seems weird if you think of Miranda (and various other procedural protections) as a "gotcha" to hinder police efforts, instead of what it is: a way to keep people ignorant of their 5th amendment rights from incriminating themselves. That's the alpha and the omega of Miranda. It's not a search and seizure protection at all, which is why evidence obtained as a result of a Miranda-less interrogation is nonetheless admissible.

Unfortunately, too many people conceive of the 4th and 5th amendment protections entirely as roadblocks to hinder police for the sake of hindering the police, instead of the targeted checks on police behavior that they are. In doing so they read important parts of the amendments (e.g. "unreasonable" or precisely what a protection applies to, or precisely what sorts of activity a protection prohibits) completely out of the text of the Constitution.

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So what's the "public safety exception" about then?

We're starting from the position that, absent a public safety concern, the defendant's right to know his rights is greater than the law enforcement interest in not encouraging the defendant to exercise them, and if the cops don't read the Miranda rights then the statements aren't admissible.

Now throw in a public safety issue -- the cops have to interrogate this guy or some people could get hurt. Why does that change the result? If the public safety issue is more important than reading the defendant his rights, then it's also more important than allowing the police to use the defendant's statements in court, since we've already decided as between those things which is more important. So the consistent outcome should be for the cops to interrogate the defendant and resolve the public safety issue, but for them not to be able to use any of those statements in court.

Is there some non-obvious reason for it to not work that way?

The public safety exception exists so police don't have to decide, before the fact in a dangerous situation, whether to immediately interrogate the suspect and give up the possibility of using what he says to convict him or to read him his Miranda rights and risk harm to the public.

What does it take to read someone their Miranda rights? 20 seconds? The dude has been in custody for hours and they simply said he won't be read them at all. It's not a safety issue at all.

No, Miranda means they don't have to answer questions and they can have a lawyer present.

No. They have those rights whether or not the police remembers to verbally inform the suspect. The suspect has every right to remain silent and every right to an attorney, even if the officer detaining him chooses not to remind him about it.

Kinda sorta, not entirely.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/supreme-court/2010/06/supre...

"The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that a criminal suspect must explicitly invoke the right to remain silent during a police interrogation, a decision that dissenting liberal justices said turns the protections of a Miranda warning “upside down.”"

This decision doesn't refute the parent poster's point. The suspect always had the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney. The decision just affirms that you have to explicitly stop the questioning by speaking your intention of that. The minority felt 2 hours of silence and badgering by the suspect indicates a wish to stop the questioning and invalidate further coercive measures to extract testimony.

You're being kinda nit-picky. All the suspect has to say is "I plead the fifth", or something to those lines.

The public safety exception strikes me as equivalent to the enemy combatant exception - a way to just skirt civil liberties when it seems relevant.

For heaven's sake. Assuming that they have arrested the correct person, he and his brother had a stack of tactical explosives that they were throwing around with abandon, as well as having bombed a major public event with loss of life and a huge level of injury. Of course the public (via its designated law enforcement agents) has a legitimate interest in establishing whether all possible explosive devices have been found and neutralized.

Bear in mind that for his trial (if he doesn't plead guilty) they'll have victim witness testimony from a person who says he saw the suspect perform a bag drop shortly before the bag exploded and blew his legs off; abundant photographic evidence, with probably more to come; whatever forensic evidence they found at the brothers' shared home; and all sorts of other information gathered in the days before he was found and captured. There'll be camera footage from the 7-11 that they held up, testimony from the person they carjacked (to whom they apparently admitted that they were the bombers), forensic evidence from the car, vast amounts of ballistics evidence...I could go on and on.

There is no way that his conviction is going to be pendant on what he says before being mirandized, and the public safety exception is about as justified here as it could ever possibly be - far more so than that in Quarles. That was a guy who allegedly had had a gun and was wearing an empty holster when caught. True, abandoned guns can be dangerous. A bumper variety pack of bombs, which it appears this suspect had and employed on multiple occasions in the last few days, presents a substantially greater risk to public safety.

Imagine that the guy knows his Miranda rights, refuses to talk and demands a lawyer. The unsaid implication of the supposed public-safety exception is that the police will do anything to get the guy to talk, constitution be damned.

No it isn't, because it would be a huge gift to the defense counsel who would rightly attack any infringement of his civil liberties (eg if they beat him up or worse). I've heard Alan Dershowitz make such 'ticking time bomb => anything goes' arguments but I think they're fatally flawed, both legally and logically.

  Assuming that they have arrested the correct person

This is not something that you get to assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Due_Process_Clause

The previous poster didn't say "We can assume they have arrested the correct person", they said (in effect), "If we assume for the sake of argument that they have arrested the correct person". Your point is absolutely valid, but entirely separate from this discussion of Miranda.

I'm assuming it only for the purposes of making my argument here on HN, not for determining the guy's guilt or innocence. I have to make some assumptions because I haven't seen any photographs or any evidence myself, so I have only a 3rd hand opinion based on news reports. The people who arrested him, by contrast, are in a position to identify him as the person they saw shooting at them earlier.

If I was sure they had arrested the right guy and that he was guilty of all those things, I wouldn't have put the 'assuming...' in there at all, but just stated what came after as fact.

To be fair, this was probably just a matter of phrasing on his part. Instead of using the word "assume" (triggering a pithy response) he should have stated this:

    If the man the police have arrested is indeed 
    Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the man implicated in the 
    bombings...

Innocent until proven guilty. The adversarial justice system in the United States is here for all of our protection, including suspected terrorists.

How is that at odds with anything I've written above?

>There'll be camera footage from the 7-11 that they held up

They didn't hold up the 7-11.

http://www.wbur.org/2013/04/15/live-blog-multiple-explosions...

Thanks for the clarification, I missed that update.

  | a way to just skirt civil liberties when
  | it seems relevant

That's exactly what it is, with good reason. When this is used, we are saying that the rights of others trump the rights of this suspect. When we're talking about the possibility of active bombs hidden within a civilian population, I would think it's a no-brainer that the rights of the people to not be blown up trumps the suspect's rights.

Also, as @anigbrowl says, this isn't going to be a case where the majority of evidence comes from the suspect's Miranda-less statements.

Edit: I will admit that this could hurt the suspect's eventual defense. Even if the statements aren't necessary to the prosecution's case, making them admissible in court could limit explanations put forth by the defendant.

If it's as simple as saying "the rights of others trump the rights of this suspect," then why not torture the suspect?

Because it's not simple. There are interests to be balanced and you can bet that defense counsel will challenge that decision pre-trial, at trial, and at appeal - and rightly so, it's not something that should be used with impunity.

Although creative writers love to put law enforcement characters on the horns of dilemmas like this because it makes for great drama, in real life the PIE does not get invoked that often because law enforcement doesn't want to risk blowing a case on it. Here, we're not balancing the public interest against all the rights of the suspect, but against his right to given notice of his legal situation. He could still clam up, ask for a lawyer, have one provided for him if he can't hire one etc., but the difference is that they're entitled under the PIE to ask him for information about outstanding risk factors (and only that) instead of giving him an advisory.

I'm guessing a bit here, but I have a hunch that if he said 'look, I set off those bombs on Monday, I feel terrible...' the interrogating officer would actually respond by saying 'we can discuss that later, now I just want to know about whether there are other bombs or weapons,' both because that's the actual priority and to avoid later legal challenges to do with 'fruits of the poisonous tree,' a colloquial term for improperly acquired evidence.

> There are interests to be balanced

That's why I dislike statements like "party1's rights trump party2's rights." In reality, it's a balance, and that probably means that reasonable people can disagree on where exactly the balance point should be placed.

Because we, as a society, frown on it? Are you really saying that there is a thin line between Miranda-less statements being admissible in court and torture?

Well, there are other arguments against the use of torture - like the fact it produces extremely unreliable information.

It is evident in this case. However, with almost any crime, the right of the people could be considered to trump the suspect right.

It is a normal and sane that a society scrutinise those cases, to make sure the exceptional stays exceptional and not the first step down a slippery slope.

There is an argument for fear in this case. The amount of exception done for terrorism "seems" quite big, compared to, for example, the cases of proven criminal let go for technical reason. Yet, there does not "seem" to be the same amount of exception to avoid due process in the name of public safety.

Also, other exception, like arresting money instead of the people in case of the war on drug. It has been proven many time that this quite clever exception, has been widely abused.

(disclaimer: "seem" between quotes because lack of hard data, and skills to find them. Would be interesting to have them though.)

>When this is used, we are saying that the rights of others trump the rights of this suspect. When we're talking about the possibility of active bombs hidden within a civilian population, I would think it's a no-brainer that the rights of the people to not be blown up trumps the suspect's rights.

Jesus this is scary thinking. You're saying the rights of a suspect go out the window when we can contrive a situation where you think other people's rights are more important?

All rights in law are a balancing act. For example, when people were lobbying to "Grandparents' Rights," codifying such rights into law would have given power in custody-type situations to the grandparents, but at the cost of taking some level of rights away from the parents.

My 'right' to murder someone is taken away by the law because it is deemed that the right of the other person to stay alive is more important.

In this case, the only right that is being taken away is the right to be informed (or reminded) of your rights prior to interrogation. He still retains his right to remain silent, he just isn't specifically told about it by police. The purpose being to allow a line of questioning that would help to eliminate the risk to the general public (in this case accomplices, hidden bombs, ties to terrorist organizations, etc). If they use this as an excuse to ask him questions that clearly aren't going to help resolve the "risk to the general public," I'm sure his defense attorney will have a field day with it.

Kind of how your first amendment rights stop at shouting "Fire" in a crowded theater and causing a stampede

Kind of how your first amendment rights stop at distributing anti-war literature, as in the case that analogy is drawn from?

You can reframe most laws in the same terms.

Civil liberties under the constitution are by and large not ironclad protections. Their scope has always been full of exceptions, because they date back to the privileges of englishman, as decided by common law courts. It has always involved a balancing between the exigencies of the situation, the need for an effective police, and the protection of the accused.

They're not ways of skirting civil liberties. They are ways of defining the contours of their protections.

It kind of seems like the public safety thing is there because they want to have their cake, but also eat it.

  | which is why evidence obtained as a result of
  | a Miranda-less interrogation is nonetheless
  | admissible

I don't know. I think that it seems reasonable that if statements obtained by police from a Miranda-less interrogation are inadmissible, then evidence that is a direct result of those statements should be to. The statements and the evidence that is linked to them seem like they are all part of the same package. The only exception I can see here is if there is a reasonable/convincing argument that police would have obtained the evidence eventually without the aid of the suspect's statements.

That may seem reasonable to you but according to Wikipedia, it's not the law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning#Consequences_of...

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