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Now that authorities have captured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the 19-year-old believed to be the second suspect in the bombings at the Boston Marathon on Monday, federal law enforcement officials are invoking the public safety exception regarding his Miranda rights, a senior Justice Department official told ABC News.

The exception, according to the FBI‘s website, “permits law enforcement to engage in a limited and focused unwarned interrogation and allows the government to introduce the statement as direct evidence.”

“Police officers confronting situations that create a danger to themselves or others may ask questions designed to neutralize the threat without first providing a warning of rights,” according to the FBI.

Anticipating that Tsarnaev may be in a condition to be questioned, expect the activation of the president’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG).

The group, set up in 2009, is made up of agents from the FBI, CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. They have been on standby waiting for the moment the suspect was taken in.

According to the FBI, the HIG’s “mission is to gather and apply the nation’s best resources to collect intelligence from key terror suspects in order to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies.”

Terry B. wrote:Talk is beyond suspending and declaring him an enemy combatant which would mean that he would possibly never see a civilian trial.

Terry B. wrote:Part of being the good guys means playing by the rules, even when the bad guys don't.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2 ... combatant/

seeahill wrote:Miranda states that anything you say "can and will be held against you in a court of law." But he may still be interrogated --- according to a recent Supreme Court ruling --- provided that what he says isn't used against him in court.

Grandpa's Spells wrote:The kid is a US citizen. With Graham already shooting his mouth off, they shouldn't be setting any new precedents.

"Public safety exception" is too vague to use. If they thought he had a nuke hidden in a subway, I would get it. He doesn't.

We killed more people in explosions this week by accident. People need to calm the fuck down before they mess around with citizens' rights.

seeahill wrote:Miranda states that anything you say "can and will be held against you in a court of law." But he may still be interrogated --- according to a recent Supreme Court ruling --- provided that what he says isn't used against him in court.

The "public safety" exception to Miranda is a powerful tool with a modern application for law enforcement. When police officers are confronted by a concern for public safety, Miranda warnings need not be provided prior to asking questions directed at neutralizing an imminent threat, and voluntary statements made in response to such narrowly tailored questions can be admitted at trial. Once the questions turn from those designed to resolve the concern for safety to questions designed solely to elicit incriminating statements, the questioning falls outside the scope of the exception and within the traditional rules of Miranda.

The Miranda rule is not, however, absolute. An exception exists in cases of "public safety". This limited and case-specific exception allows certain unadvised statements (given without Miranda warnings) to be admissible into evidence at trial when they were elicited in circumstances where there was great danger to public safety.[8]
The public safety exception derives from New York v. Quarles, a case in which the Supreme Court considered the admissibility of a statement elicited by a police officer who apprehended a rape suspect who was thought to be carrying a firearm. The arrest took place in a crowded grocery store. When the officer arrested the suspect, he found an empty shoulder holster, handcuffed the suspect, and asked him where the gun was. The suspect nodded in the direction of the gun (which was near some empty cartons) and said, "The gun is over there". The Supreme Court found that such an unadvised statement was admissible in evidence because "n a kaleidoscopic situation such as the one confronting these officers, where spontaneity rather than adherence to a police manual is necessarily the order of the day, the application of the exception we recognize today should not be made to depend on post hoc findings at a suppression hearing concerning the subjective motivation of the police officer".[9] Thus, the jurisprudential rule of Miranda must yield in "a situation where concern for public safety must be paramount to adherence to the literal language of the prophylactic rules enunciated in Miranda". The rule of Miranda is not, therefore, absolute and can be a bit more elastic in cases of public safety.[8] Under this exception, to be admissible in the government's direct case at a trial, the questioning must not be "actually compelled by police conduct which overcame his will to resist," and must be focused and limited, involving a situation "in which police officers ask questions reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety.".[10] In 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation encouraged agents to use a broad interpretation of public safety-related questions in terrorism cases, stating that the "magnitude and complexity" of terrorist threats justified "a significantly more extensive public safety interrogation without Miranda warnings than would be permissible in an ordinary criminal case," continuing to list such examples as: "questions about possible impending or coordinated terrorist attacks; the location, nature and threat posed by weapons that might pose an imminent danger to the public; and the identities, locations, and activities or intentions of accomplices who may be plotting additional imminent attacks." A Department of Justice spokesman described this position as not altering the constitutional right, but as clarifying existing flexibility in the rule.[11]

Grandpa's Spells wrote:The kid is a US citizen.

Steggy wrote:

Grandpa's Spells wrote:The kid is a US citizen.

No he isn't, but his now dead brother was a U.S. citizen.

DrDonkeyLove wrote:So what is this kid, an American citizen who belongs in the criminal justice system, or an enemy combatant who belongs in the military justice system?

johno wrote:

DrDonkeyLove wrote:So what is this kid, an American citizen who belongs in the criminal justice system, or an enemy combatant who belongs in the military justice system?

That is the question.

The practical question is, if there is a connection to AQ, will the Obama Administration take the Enemy Combatant route?

Probably, the FBI has combed through the brothers' (and their family's) computers, and has a pretty good idea of their contacts.

kreator wrote:Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski were both read their Miranda rights and convicted in a civillian court. Like them, Tsarnaev is an American citizen and committed his crime(s) on American soil, and his crimes, while awful, really aren't much worse than those.

The civilian court system fortunately has ways to deal with these type of people. There's no need to make him an "enemy combatant" just because it's politically advantageous. I'm not worried about his rights for his sake, I'm worried that if anyone else ever gets accused of something like this and really had nothing to do with it, that they wouldn't be locked up in a military interrogation facility.

kreator wrote: I'm not worried about his rights for his sake, I'm worried that if anyone else ever gets accused of something like this and really had nothing to do with it, that they wouldn't be locked up in a military interrogation facility.

”Freedom is about authority..... Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.”

BucketHead wrote:Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose'

BucketHead wrote:Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose'

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be acceptable for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask Mr. Tsarnaev about “imminent” threats, like whether other bombs are hidden around Boston. But he said that for broader questioning, the F.B.I. must not “cut corners.”

“The public safety exception to Miranda should be a narrow and limited one, and it would be wholly inappropriate and unconstitutional to use it to create the case against the suspect,” Mr. Romero said. “The public safety exception would be meaningless if interrogations are given an open-ended time horizon.”