Word: miranda
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...Year's Eve, a very nervous man in a leather bombardier's jacket walked into the police station in Concord, N.H., and said that he was the fugitive wanted for the New York subway shootings. The policemen read Goetz his Miranda warning, telling him he did not have to talk if he preferred not to. He wanted to. For the next four hours, two of which were videotaped, Goetz unburdened himself. While he did not feel he had done anything wrong, Goetz said he had "acted like a cold-blooded savage." Several times he punctuated his account by remarking that...
...slug-the-thugs attitude is evident in the judiciary as well. The U.S. Supreme Court now allows judges to admit illegally seized evidence as long as the police acted "in good faith." The Justices also have weakened the Miranda protections under which suspects must be granted counsel before answering police questions. Since the court's 1976 decision allowing capital punishment, 37 states have resumed executions. Pretrial detention of potentially violent defendants is now permitted in different forms in some 30 states...
...ruling is the second round of tinkering with the Miranda rule in nine months; last June a 5-4 majority said police could dispense with the warning before questioning a suspect if there was a threat to the public safety--in that case, a discarded gun in a supermarket. Conservative Justice Sandra Day O'Connor dissented from that decision, saying that it "blurs the edges" of a clear rule. But this time it was O'Connor who was picking at the edges, in the case of an 18-year-old from Salem, Ore., accused of involvement...
When initially questioned, Michael Elstad blurted out, "Yes, I was there." Taken to sheriff's headquarters, Elstad was given a Miranda warning for the first time, then asked again about the crime, whereupon he signed a full confession. But an Oregon appeals court reversed his conviction, saying that the first, illegally obtained statement tainted the second and rendered it inadmissible in court. Because the "cat was sufficiently out of the bag," the state court concluded, Elstad confessed the second time thinking his fate was sealed. Justice O'Connor, writing for the majority, found this kind of "psychological" analysis unpersuasive. There...
Liberal Justice William Brennan was not reassured. He accused the majority of delivering a "potentially crippling blow to Miranda and . . . the rights of persons accused of crime." Georgetown Law Professor William Greenhalgh sympathized with the dissenters, noting that despite O'Connor's bright-line endorsement, "exceptions like this tend to dim that line for police in the field." The practical impact may not be large, said other observers, but the new ruling is another sign that the conservative members of the court intend to keep on whittling...