DOJ Official: No Miranda Rights For Boston Bombing Suspect Yet

A DOJ official explains why Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzokhar Tsarnaev has not been read his Miranda rights.

"The suspect is en route to the hospital for immediate treatment," the official tells TPM's Sahil Kapur. "But we plan to invoke the public safety exception to Miranda in order to question the suspect extensively about other potential explosive devices or accomplices and to gain critical intelligence."

The public safety exception allows law enforcement officials to question suspects briefly in a legally admissable way prior to providing Miranda rights in cases of terrorism or when the public might face imminent threat.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/doj-official-no-miranda-rights-for-boston-bombing

Constitutional law already permits law-enforcement officials to question a suspect in custody, without Miranda warnings, if public-safety considerations justify doing so. For at least 25 years, it has been clear that law enforcement does not have to provide Miranda warnings before asking a suspect questions that, as the Supreme Court has put it, are “reasonably prompted by a concern for the public safety.” Thus, if the FBI captures a suspected terrorist bomber, and has grounds for concern that other attempted bombings might be in motion, the FBI can non-coercively interrogate the suspect for information about those other suspected plots without giving the suspect Miranda warnings. One crucial consequence is that any statements the suspect makes during that questioning that also incriminate himself can be used against him in a later criminal prosecution.

Yet the Court has recognized and elaborated the public-safety exception in cases unlike many of today's terrorism cases, and thus the boundaries of the exception in the terrorism context remain unclear. When the FBI or other government agencies capture a terrorist suspect, they will often want to question him or her for two related, but different kinds of purposes: (1) for information that will protect the public against any immediate security threats and (2) for more general intelligence about others who might have assisted the suspect in the (completed or attempted) act of terrorism for which he has been apprehended, about the nature and organization of the terrorist groups he or she is associated with (if any), and the like. While the public-safety exception permits pre-Miranda questioning for the first purpose, how that exception applies to this second purpose is far from clear.

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http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/05/should-congress-codify-public-safety.html