High Court to Hear Miranda Challenge

[goofyfish]

While the farm worker lay gravely wounded, a police supervisor pressed him to talk, to explain his version of the events. He survived, paralyzed and blinded, and sued the police for, among other things, coercive interrogation.

But Oxnard police assert that the Miranda ruling does not include a "constitutional right to be free of coercive interrogation," but only a right not to have forced confessions used at trial.

Bush administration lawyers have sided with the police in the case. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Dec. 4.

So, we have come to this? To adopting the same standards of interrogation described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Gulag, where he noted the very same prerogatives applied to badly injured prisoners? If the Supremes tilt for this abomination, they really have rubber-stamped tyranny, Soviet-style repression and overt use of force.

Legal experts on the other side of the case foresee far-reaching effects if the police prevail.

"This will be, in essence, a reversal of Miranda," said University of Texas law professor Susan Klein.

"Officers will be told Miranda is not a constitutional right. If there is no right, and you are not liable, why should you honor the right to silence?" she asked. "I think it means you will see more police using threats and violence to get people to talk. Innocent people will be subjected to very unpleasant experiences." (Full text here)

For some time now, I have believed that the Solicitor General should recuse himself from any opinions or motions having to do with the “war on terrorism.” After all, his wife Barbara died on the plane that hit the Pentagon and it seems to me that he has an inherent conflict of interest when it comes to issues of crime and punishment of “terrorists.” – as his first instinct will be to come down hard against a person's Constitutional rights.

Now the Justice Department asserts that it is constitutionally permissible to continue to interrogate a critically wounded man, whom the police shot through the eye and spine. In his brief to the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson argues that police can hold people in custody and force them to talk, so long as their incriminating statements are not used to prosecute them. Such a perversely reasoned and immoral legal argument should chill every thinking person to his or her very marrow.

Apparently, Mr. Olsen leans against constitutional rights for us all.

Peace.