No matter how evil he is, Dzhokar Tsarnaev is still an American. The police should read him his Miranda Rights.
I’ve never been to Chechnya; I can’t even find it on a map (I tried). I’ve never built a bomb. I’ve never fired a gun at anyone; I’ve never wanted to. I’ve never seen an eight-year old I thought was deserving of death. I’ve never understood people who do. What I have been, and do understand, is feeling like an “other”.
None of my feelings of other-ness have ever driven me to the places that Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev went. I wouldn’t even know how to get there from where I am, and I don’t want to know what kind of dark world they inhabit both inside and outside of their minds. However, Tamerlan said on his Youtube page (which will not be linked), “I don’t have any American friends. I don’t understand them.” That’s somebody who felt like an “other”.
Tamerlan sleeps in a morgue now, and I sleep just fine knowing that. His brother is sleeping in a jail cell, and as of this writing, April 21st at 7:15PM CST, he hasn’t been read his Miranda rights. Dzhokar is an American citizen; he said the words on September 11th, 2013. Obviously, those words meant absolutely nothing to him, but he said them, and that makes him an American citizen (read: a little less “other”). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) doesn’t think that he should be read those rights; Sen. Graham says that Dzhokar is an “enemy combatant”. Those words have a legal definition that basically means “foreign terrorist”. I agree with Lindsey Graham, in the sense that Dzhokar Tsarnaev is an enemy of America. He’s an American, too. The enemy is disturbed young men; they’re often intelligent, disaffected, different, and most importantly, they’re very angry. We won’t know why Dzhokar thought those people, his fellow Americans, should die, and unless he tells us, we may never know.
It would be a mistake to treat him as an enemy combatant in the legal sense. That would effectively say, “We let a terrorist in.” He came here when he was eight years old; I refuse to believe that second graders are terrorists. He became a monster while he was living here. He went to war with us, but I’m willing to bet that he felt we were already at war with him. That, in absolutely no way, excuses any single action he took after that first monstrous thought entered his head.
The list of unassuming young men who reveal themselves to be monsters is long and will only get longer. We need to Mirandize Dzhokar Tsarnaev because he’s a terrorist that was in our midst. If we treat him like a member of Al-Qaeda in a faraway place, then we’re saying that it can’t happen again and we had nothing to do with it.
In the United States, we offer even the ugliest of criminals due process of law because that is one thing separating us from the bad guys. Our criminal justice system is sluggish and inefficient at times, but if we turn off fairness, then we’re starting down a dark path.
I don’t know what made Dzhokar Tsarnaev into a monster, but I’m assuming that he felt the staggering “other”-ness. The pain is that he isn’t “other”, not truly. He’s an American and we need to treat him like one; sit him in a court of law and let all of the U.S. watch. Then, we start talking about what is making young men so damn angry.
—Photo/CNN
It worked. DOJ sucker-punched the FBI interrogation. The bastard has shut up. It’s meaningless as regards his prosecution, but it does put a barrier to getting further intel.
Looks like somebody got what they wanted.
This is what Richard is referring to, by the way, : http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/officials-suspect-stopped-talking-after-miranda.php
There seems to be some kind of view that the Miranda warning is an assignment of amorphous and broad privilege. “rights”. Wrong. What it means is that anything he says can be used against him in court. Anything he says before being warned CANNOT be used against him in court. So a delay in the warning costs him nothing in court. That’s why the cops try to warn a guy as soon as possible, so that anything said is admissible. If you don’t warn him, he can talk and talk and talk and confess to the last detail and there’s… Read more »
No one is fooled by this screed. If this guy was a nerdy, dweeby white guy you would want him executed yesterday.
Busted.
Read him his rights, try him, execute him. We have a process for this, and every nerdy, dweeby white guy who’s shot up his school and lived to stand trial has gone through that process. Timothy McVeigh stood trial through the same process. Why is this man being treated any differently?
From what I understand, the evidence they have is enough, they don’t need to ask him anything.
He is accused of murder, and should be tried as a criminal.
The status of enemy combatant is an attempt to place people into a legal no-mans land. It denies them the status of a criminal defendant who is protected by the constitution, and the status of a prisoner of war who is protected by the Geneva convention.
How could he have “said the words on September 11th 2013” exactly??
Oops. I meant September 11th, 2012. I didn’t mean to imply that he’s a time-traveler.
All Miranda does is allow what the guy says to be used in court. He can talk his head off if he wants to, but it can’t be used in court. The prosecution would have to use other evidence. In this case, we have sufficient other evidence that the prosecution probably thinks they don’t need a confession. So there’s nothing to be lost, including his rights, if the Miranda was delayed. OTOH, giving him a lawyer and the warning means he’ll shut up about everything, including intel. So he gains nothing by having his rights read, and we lose intel.… Read more »
They’re called “rights” for a reason, yes? Are we really allowed to decide that it’s inconvenient for us and, in our estimation, of no concrete benefit for him if he exercises these rights, so we’re just going to not tell him about them? I mean, presumably he has some knowledge of the whole “right to remain silent, right to have an attorney present” spiel, but do we not have any moral obligation to be, I dunno, remotely consistent in the way we treat American citizens? Isn’t that kind of the foundation of our system of government: all citizens have certain… Read more »
Miranda rights aren’t absolute. They give one the right to remain silent, and any information taken from suspect without those rights having been read are not admissible in court. Law enforcement seems confident that they have enough information at this point that is admissible in court that they don’t have to worry about Miranda limitations. As far as Tamerlan feeling like “the other” – such a statement and the piece in general does come very close to apologia. Yes, it probably was culture shock for the Tsarnaevs when they came to the States. But should we expect that immigrants from… Read more »
I wonder if people want this to be a military tribunal so that he will be eligible for the death penalty, which Massachusetts doesn’t currently have. But he is still eligible if this is prosecuted as a federal crime, which it probably would be as an act of terrorism. There is really no benefit to avoiding reading him his rights in the long run. It doens’t happen very often, but people have gotten convictions overturned because of it. You’d think people would want to eliminate any possibility of that.
This is one of the sanest, most rational, most insightful, and most intelligent pieces of commentary on this horror that I’ve read. Excellent piece.