On Fox and Friends, Glenn Beck and Brian Kilmeade debated the issue of when to read the suspect his rights. Beck took the position that the Constitution must be upheld and the guy should be read his rights; Kilmeade, whether out of conviction or just playing devil's advocate, chided Beck for "forgoing the intelligence."
The Holder Justice Department caught a lot of flak (a lot of it from me) about reading The Underwear Bomber his rights after less than an hour of interrogation.
The difference here, of course, is that Shahzad is an American citizen. I'm going to stand with Beck on this one. As he said, it's probably not a "popular" decision, but you can't disregard the Constitution. The popular decision would be to drop the guy in a vat of boiling oil, but we can't do that either.
Stay tuned to Stacy McCain's place today. While I'm killing Julius Caesar (again), Stacy is all over this story and the rapidly developing updates.
3 comments:
Mirandize a citizen, don't Mirandize a foreign terrorist. Why do I have a feeling that this issure is totally boggling the mind a liberal?
Agreed. Constitutional rights belong solely to citizens. Aliens and non-citizens have human rights, and those rights the Romans called jus gentium, but it's important to respect the difference.
By the by, the man who wrote the text of the usual Miranda warning passed away recently. It was a spur of the moment response to the ruling, and because he was a hobby printer as well as a lawyer, he printed it on little wallet cards and sold them to police departments all over the country! That's how it became "standardized", because the court didn't mandate the language.
He's an American citizen who was arrested in America, he has to be Mirandized. He is also, of course, eligible for trial for treason and the death penalty that accompanies a guilty verdict. I'm for that one.
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