IN the last couple of days some prominent Republicans (John McCain and Lindsey Graham) have said that the Times Square Bomber should not have been read his Miranda Rights. But the fact that ehy aren’t read their rights doesn’t mean they don’t still have those rights, I would assume. SO what they are really calling for, I guess, is not giving a person their rights, and not so much the Mirandizing of the rights.
Am I right (no pun intended)?
You do not need to Mirandize someone to arrest them. You need to Mirandize them before you interrogate them.
McCain and company are fools. If they did not Mirandize the Times Square bomber then anything he said under interrogation would be inadmissible. Particularly since the guy is a US citizen.
They are further fools since eroding those rights is eroding them for all of us.
McCain doesn’t give a damn about their rights, your rights, or my rights. All he cares about is looking “tough on terror” to appease the fringe of the right wing that he needs to win his primary battle. Shame on all those who use every potential terror threat as a chance for cheap political points.
Actually, they did not read him his rights when they first interrogated him, and they were perfectly correct to do so, based on the public safety exception outlined in New York v. Quarles.
Once it became clear there was no imminent threat, they Mirandized him, and his post-Miranda answers are admissible against him under in Missouri v. Seibert.
But even though he was not read his Miranda Rights could he still invoke his right to an attorney and his right to not incriminate himself?
I missed out on the drama when McCain first made these comments, I only read about them after reading that the Deputy Director of the FBI came out and said they did not initially Mirandize Faisal under the public safety exception to Miranda.
I assumed that was what McCain was calling for, if he was calling for something else then I’m not sure what.
My guesses would be:
He was calling for Faisal to not be treated as a criminal but instead be handed over to some sort of intelligence agency for Cold War era “interrogation” techniques. (I have no idea the legality of that, I’d imagine it would be technically illegal but probably not totally out of line with things we did during the height of the Cold War.)
He misunderstood the situation and thought that if police somehow refrained from giving the Miranda warnings it would mean they could get more information from Faisal that was of interest to national security.
What would the FBI have done if he didn’t want to answer their questions? During World War II if you captured a spy, they probably didn’t want to talk.
Their rights or lack of rights didn’t actually change the fundamental situation: they didn’t want to talk, their captors wanted them to talk.
What happens next?
Well, a spy would probably be tortured and killed until they gave information.
Whatever “rights” or “laws” exist, when you have someone who refuses to give you information, you can either leave him alone or you can try to make him give you the information through force.
Since the FBI is an American Federal law enforcement agency it would be my assumption that torture is off the table. So if Faisal wanted to quit talking he could have quit talking regardless of whether or not it was legally correct of him to invoke his rights against self incrimination.
Essentially I’m saying “I don’t know” if it would have been “technically correct” of him to invoke his right against self-incrimination, but if someone doesn’t want to talk there’s no way in that situation to make him talk without the law enforcement officers committing a crime themselves.
Of course.
Don’t you think there might just be a whole realm of possible actions in between walking away and beating the crap out of him?
You’ve been watching too much “24”.
We went round on this a year or so ago here on the SDMB and provided abundant evidence that the last thing you do to a spy to get information is torture them. Those with a clue in the interrogation profession know this.
Here’s just one data point (bolding mine):
Torture is an excellent way to get “information” out of people. Just not useful information. You won’t get the truth, you’ll get whatever the victim thinks is most likely to stop the torture.
The person who doesn’t give a damn about your rights is the person who tried to blow up Time Square. Nothing Senator McCain has suggested is an infringement of anyone’s rights.
As has been pointed out, you do not need to read someone their miranda rights in certain situations. There are times when it is makes sense not to do it.
McCain pointed this out on Face the Nation in regards to the attempted bombing of an airliner by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He was questioned for almost an hour before he was read his rights. Much information was gathered from that interview. According to McCain he was cooperative until he got a lawyer. This person entered the country on a military trained mission to destroy a plane full of passengers and we lost an opportunity to gather as much information as possible.
You can’t self incriminate if you aren’t mirandized. It’s not admissible. The reason you don’t mirandize is to try to get information beyond that which would convict the person questioned. If you can find accomplices or other bombs planted then it is valuable information that doesn’t affect the case yet can lead to other convictions.
This isn’t true. You cannot self incriminate if you aren’t mirandized in a situation which requires you to be mirandized. That’s very different to what you said.
Correction noted.
I didn’t think being Mirandized actually gave you any rights. I thought it was merely the police informing you of the rights you can exercise. Presumably if you know your Miranda rights on your own you are free to exercise them.
Unless that is in error I do not see the fuss except to try to hide from someone that they have rights they may be unaware of.
I think my comments intent was misconstrued.
I was basically saying that in all situations, if someone doesn’t want to talk there isn’t much more you can do. You can try ripping their fingernails out or whatever, but whether or not someone can appropriately “invoke their fifth amendment rights” is irrelevant to the matter of whether or not they’re “allowed” to quit talking.
That’s totally irrelevant to what I said, I was just trying to make a point that if someone wants to clam up it doesn’t matter if doing so is “permissible” due to their fifth amendment rights or not. Until people can be placed under telepathic mind control people always have the option to refuse to speak.
I don’t watch 24 by the way; but there are definitely situations in which force can be used to get perfectly valid information.
Let’s say I rob a rich man’s house, and I know he has a wall safe in which he keeps thousands of dollars in cash. I point a gun at him and demand the combination, he either gives it, or I shoot him in the foot. If I shoot him in the foot and he still doesn’t give it up, I threaten to shoot his other foot. I think it’s fairly realistic to assume you’d eventually get “usable” information from the guy.
In your example the information is immediately verifiable and the person almost certainly is willing to give up what is in the safe rather than get shot.
This is rarely the case in a police/military interrogation.
The problem is the interrogator does not know what the truthful answers are and determining the veracity of what the person says can be difficult or impossible. Thing is they may well expend valuable resources on a wild goose chase. Imagine I say. “Martin Hyde is our leader!” under torture. Thing is you aren’t but they go track you down and start torturing you. They ask you for answers you do not have because you’re not the right guy. They do not believe your protests of innocence and, since you know nothing, you start making stuff up which they then go chasing after just to get them to stop.
IIRC there was a story of a woman in the 70’s being tortured by the Chilean or Argentinian government (I forget which). She actually gave them the truthful answers almost immediately. Thing is they didn’t believe those answers so kept torturing her and she started making stuff up trying to find anything to get them to stop. They chased after the bogus people and, eventually, found that she had given the honest answers the first time. By that time however her co-conspirators were long gone and well into hiding.
Abdulmutallab started talking again even after being Mirandized. The idea that we lost out on good intelligence is pure speculation.
Also, the fact that the current suspect is an actual honest-to-goodness US citizen certainly should have some bearing on the situation, no?