When you get right down to it, Miranda protects the police and prosecutors. If they fail to remind you of your rights, there is a good chance that information they obtain from an interrogation will not be admissible in court. So in failing to Mirandize Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, all the authorities are doing is weakening their position, making it harder to use the information they obtain to get a conviction.
More than that, this bizarre and irrational need to refuse Mirandizing Dzhokhar is actually generating sympathy for the man. There are a very vocal core of lawmakers, journalists and lawyers who are standing up for Dzhokhar’s rights. “We’re trying to trick him into disclosing information, and that was precisely what Miranda was designed to prevent. If it’s allowed today with him, an American citizen, where will it stop?” asked Alan Dershowitz this morning on MSNBC.
Alan couldn’t be more right. It is a slippery slope we’re on, and we only need to pick up a history book to see where this all could go.
By striping Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his natural rights (which, by the way, he has because he’s human – not because he’s American) the U.S. government is opening the door for the defense to change what this case is all about. It will no longer be about justice, but how far we are willing to go to get it.
How much will we shred the Constitution to allay our fears of another bomb plot? How much of our freedom must be ceded to the government to keep these sorts of horrible things from happening? Shall we censor the internet, deny people free access to information, if it means another 19-year-old radical will have a harder time making a homemade bomb?
The truth is we can never stop all the bombs. We can never totally assure safety. It doesn’t matter if we ban the Internet, have the TSA dedicated to 24-7 full body cavity searches and put tracking chips on every person the government suspects of being a “terrorist.” Another psycho will blow up a bomb in a crowded place. Count on it.
It is a child’s belief that we can see every angle, protect ourselves from every potential threat. This dangerously misguided notion, which should fade away along with belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, has been marched out throughout history as a rationale for the destruction of human freedom. The authorities need to stop behaving like petulant 6-year-olds and wake up to the fact that it is our respect for the law and natural rights that sets us apart from murderous lunatics like the the Tsarnaev brothers and Timothy McVeigh (who, oddly, did have a Miranda warning read to him). Our willingness to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, access to proper counsel and protection against self-incrimination is what makes us fundamentally different from religious zealots, anarchistic bomb-rollers and fascist demagogues. Every time we deny people their natural human rights we become a little more like the monsters we are trying to fight until, one day, a repressive society men like Mohammed Omar desire will become a reality.
And we will have done it to ourselves.
