Miranda down

The Obama administration has limited Miranda protection for terrorism suspects:

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. . .

The Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to remain silent and to have an attorney present for questioning. A 1984 decision amended that by allowing the questioning of suspects for a limited time before issuing the warning in cases where public safety was at issue.

That exception was seen as a limited device to be used only in cases of an imminent safety threat, but the new rules give interrogators more latitude and flexibility to define what counts as an appropriate circumstance to waive Miranda rights.

The new rules were issued last December, but not made public.

Yet another civil rights triumph from the administration that wants to search laptops without a warrant, sample the DNA of every suspect arrested, and track US citizens via their cell phones (without a warrant), that investigated political opponents posing no threat to public safety, and that planned to limit our rights to petition our government. (Those last two policies were reversed after they came to light.)

(Via Professor Bainbridge.)

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