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WHUT.

It appears that the Supreme court is made of fail this week.

Well, as a prosecutor, I'm doing a little happy dance, but I can see where others might be somewhat miffed. Personally, I wish all of Miranda would be overturned so that people would stop pretending it's more than a mouthed ritual that doesn't so much protect the rights of the accused as provide an umbrella for lawyers who can manipulate the system. Reciting the Miranda warning as fas as you can and then having someone sign to say they heard it never protected anyone's rights, and no one got less guilty because they confessed after someone missed or muffed the warning. It's not an area where the court should be making the rules, which is what happened with Miranda and the case overturned here. The legislature needs to get off its butt and do something that makes sense. Which is difficult to imagine, I know.

But if Miranda gets overturned, SOMETHING has to be there instead. Just because the current system is abused and fucked up doesn't mean that destroying it isn't going to make things worse, and I have trouble believing that it wouldn't.

Ok, the court should not be making the rules? Who should? What should they be? Something has to be there. I see enough articles about police tomfuckery that I don't feel that simply breaking down the current system is okay.

I'd love to hear alternatives from someone better educated than me, but in the meantime this only makes me angry. Fine, reform the system. But don't dissemble the current one until a new one's ready or feasible.

Well the thing is, the court basically told the legislature in Miranda "The system is borked, and you've got to fix it." That was forty years ago, though, and nothing's been done. The system doesn't work, and even if they hadn't overturned this decision, it still wouldn't have worked. The court didn't strip the right to an attorney, it stripped the ironclad-to-the-point-of-madness rule that says once someone's asked for an attorney, that's the end of the story. It's a great theory, but they apply it so bizarrely that it's meaningless. In this case, someone was appointed an attorney, then freely agreed to talk to police. That would've been prohibited as against the magic rule, while instead if he'd asked for an attorney, not been given one, but had been tricked into talking again after that, it would've been okay, because that's not against the magic rule.

What the court did was to overturn its own non-working rule and in the meantime, it's exciting the sensibilities of the public, who may not understand the intricacies of when you must and needn't have a lawyer, but sure do understand "the right to an attorney." Look at the headline on the WSJ article to see what spin they chose to put on it, and you'll see. The court didn't overturn a case or allow for a suspect to cooperate with police. The Court ruled that suspects could be interrogated without a lawyer, which is simply not factually correct outside of a very narrow circumstance.

But it's okay to be mad about the system, and you should be mad, and take action. That's the good that I see coming out of this, the political pressure finally rising to a point where the Congress actually starts making some rules about this stuff that aren't just some cobbled-together nonsense based on legal interpretation and precedent. Making laws isn't the court's job, it's not what it's set up for and it's not what it's good at. The problem is that legislators are terrified of being seen as "soft on crime" and are unwilling, outside of overwhelming public support, to do anything that might give a suspect more rights. Only if there is a public outcry about stuff like this is anything going to get done.

It's a classic problem in politics when the majority agrees that the current system needs to be replaced but no single replaced has enough support to replace it.

It's also a classic problem when the current system gets thrown out but things get worse when nobody can agree on what to put in its place.

though, political debate aside, it is nice to know that you still read my journal :)

I'm afraid it's not so easy to get off my friends list. You may be stuck with me for life. ;)

W. T. F. O_O

The scope of this case is quite limited. You still have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, and the right to have one provided for you. I do worry that this will open the door to "revolving" interrogation, where zealous officers will take crack after crack at questioning in an attempt to badger the suspect into giving something up. Miranda protections still prevent him from being coerced into false confessions, though, so I don't see it as particularly unjust, just annoying.

That said, this is Congress's job to sort out. I don't see how the court could decide any other way, other than on a very broad interpretation of the 6th Amendment. Between this and Heller, I'm scratching my head wondering how the hell we have a court that's willing to have such large branches away from constitutional principles. And sometimes it's not even dissents: see Gonzalez v. Raich, and Kelo v. City of New London.

I'm somewhat disappointed in the "liberal" side of the court at the moment.

I do worry that this will open the door to "revolving" interrogation, where zealous officers will take crack after crack at questioning in an attempt to badger the suspect into giving something up.

Yes. My concern is not for the majority of cases in which this will be relevant, but for cases when police push at the boundaries of what's permissible.

I agree with both you and electra310, above, in that I'd like some actual legislature involved.