turbo said:
I'm having some trouble with the way that "suspect #2" is being treated. There are some in our government that want to deprive him of any legal representation, starting with no Miranda rights.
http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/201...-marathon-bombing-suspect-is-un-american?lite
There are some in our government that want him imprisoned as an "enemy combatant" (Gitmo, anyone?).
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/political-insider/2013/apr/20/saxby-chambliss-treat-boston-suspect-enemy-combata/
And yet others who would like to see him tortured.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/20/greg-ball-torture_n_3122524.html
The bomber came to the US as a child and has been here over a decade. He is a naturalized US citizen. Can any US citizen be deprived of basic legal rights? If so, where does it stop?. The crimes that he and his older brother are accused of are horrific. Still, is the US legal system unable to process him even in the face of accusations of such terrible offenses?
IMO, I would be a breath of fresh air if politicians would stop trying to subvert our judicial system to make points at home.
The reading him his rights is almost meaningless. It's just to make sure even the uneducated (i.e. - those that don't watch police shows on TV) know their rights.
I think what they really mean is that they won't technically arrest him for 48 hours (or however long they question him). That way they can question him as a witness without a lawyer to gain intel on anyone else associated with the bombing. That doesn't mean any info that they get from him that incriminates
him would be guaranteed of being admitted in court.
In this case, I don't think authorities would have to depend on his answers to their interrogation to convict him and whether or not any answers he gives can be used in his own court case is the least of the authorities' concern. On the other hand, I don't think he's likely to give information that would incriminate anyone else (but you never know). I do think they could get a more clear picture of just what motivated them, where they got the information needed to construct the bombs, etc. In that sense, this would be a good case for denying him his right to representation for at least some initial questioning.
The benefits gained are that he won't have a lawyer that will help him use the information he has that the authorities want to plea bargain a more lenient sentence (but it doesn't necessarily mean that he couldn't try to negotiate a better deal on his own or decide he's not going to give any info until he has someone to help him negotiate a better deal.)
I think classifying him as an enemy combatant has some problems. In fact, I think they really mean an
unlawful combatant. If he's an enemy combatant, we're acknowledging his actions as a legitimate act of war and he should be held as a POW until the war ends (in fact, most of the Gitmo residents would have been released already if we had some country besides the US where we could release them).
Except in this case, the opposing force was an "army" of two, they've been defeated, and now we release all the POWs - in this case, the surviving suspect. I don't think we really want to do that. But if we did, then we could turn around and prosecute him for war crimes, since there was obviously no military value in the target they chose. I still think that's a really stupid idea.
Even if they mean an
unlawful combatant, I think there's some problems. Do some people really want to reraise the issue that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply to unlawful combatants (including mercenaries) and so we're justified in torturing them? It's true that the Geneva Convention can't be used to protect unlawful combatants, but that doesn't mean they have no human rights (after all, it's not the government that gives us those rights and it's not the government that can take those rights away).
Plus, this would be a bad case to use to reraise the issue. It's very doubtful Tsarnaev has any information useful enough to justify torture. In this case, I'd feel like we torturing him just to show we can and I think that would definitely be a war crime in itself.
Maybe there's some other benefit to classifying him as an "unlawful" enemy combatant, but I don't really see what that is, based on the appearance that these two seem to have acted entirely on their own (at least based on the info available to the public right now).