In the “class participation” section of my comic, commenter G. T. Bogosian this morning asked: Why does the supreme court keep guaranteeing that we have a right to counsel, but only in situations that almost never come up in real life? Is there some guiding constitutional interpretive philosophy that explains...
So after catching one of the guys thought to have committed the Boston Marathon bombing (and a string of violent acts thereafter), the government said they weren’t going to read him his rights. Not just yet. Invoking the “public safety exception” to the Miranda rule, they said they wanted a...
So on Thursday the WSJ reported that the Obama administration has changed the rules of investigating terror suspects, to permit interrogation without Miranda warnings in certain circumstances: A Federal Bureau of Investigation memorandum reviewed by The Wall Street Journal says the policy applies to “exceptional cases” where investigators “conclude that...
Last week, the House passed a bill that would prevent the federal government from prosecuting Guantanamo detainees in civilian courts (by cutting off the funds to do so). The Senate is now considering it as part of the 1,900-page omnibus spending bill. This is largely seen as a reaction to...
Last month, we wrote a piece here on reasons why innocent people wind up confessing to crimes they didn’t commit. It’s a horrible thought, yet it happens far too often. (For tips on defending cases involving a confession, see our CLE lecture over at West Legal Ed Center.) Anyway, there’s a...
The blawgosphere was atwitter recently over that Kentucky murder trial where the defendant had confessed, but claimed it was a false confession, due to “sleep-deprived psychosis” from drinking too much coffee. The jury didn’t buy it (here’s a short article on it). Did that case remind anyone else of this...
It should come as no surprise to anyone with any experience in criminal law that perfectly innocent people will sometimes confess to crimes they did not commit. Perhaps they were in a suggestible state, and the police led them to believe they’d done it. Maybe they were broken by the...
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