Count Me Confused
The Hill reports:
The head of the House Intelligence panel is worried the Justice Department may have jeopardized the public’s safety by allowing a federal judge to read the Boston bombing suspect his Miranda rights before fully interrogating him. Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep.
The Hill reports:
Look, I have long argued for reform of presentment rules in high-stakes terrorism cases to permit a delay. Last I checked, neither Congress nor the administration had taken me up on that. Until they do, nobody should complain when the Justice Department allows a magistrate to conduct a presentment hearing in a hospital.
The head of the House Intelligence panel is worried the Justice Department may have jeopardized the public’s safety by allowing a federal judge to read the Boston bombing suspect his Miranda rights before fully interrogating him.I'm off in England, and maybe I'm missing something, but hang on a second. Since when is it up to the Justice Department whether to allow a coordinate branch of government to advise a charged criminal suspect of his rights? Since when is it up to Congress to decide whether it "can[] have . . . the judiciary deciding" whether a suspect gets presented before a magistrate?
Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) is demanding answers from Attorney General Eric Holder on why the DOJ allowed a magistrate judge to inform Dzhokhar Tsarnaev of his Miranda rights while the FBI was in the midst of interrogating him earlier this week.
“We can’t have, in a case like this, the judiciary deciding, because it’s on TV and it might look bad for them … that they were going to somehow intercede in this,” Rogers, a former FBI agent, said in an interview with MSNBC.
“It’s confusing, it is horrible, [a] God-awful policy, and dangerous to the greater community,” he said. “And we have got to get to the bottom of this, and we’ve got to fix it right now.”
Look, I have long argued for reform of presentment rules in high-stakes terrorism cases to permit a delay. Last I checked, neither Congress nor the administration had taken me up on that. Until they do, nobody should complain when the Justice Department allows a magistrate to conduct a presentment hearing in a hospital.
Benjamin Wittes is editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books.
