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In congressional testimony on January 20, the nation’s top intelligence official, Dennis Blair, acknowledged that the U.S. government mishandled the interrogation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian terrorist who tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. Specifically, Blair was not happy that Abdulmutallab was charged as a common criminal and read his rights, rather than being questioned by the elite interrogation unit announced by President Obama as a replacement for the CIA teams used by the Bush administration. “I’d been a part of the deliberations which established this high-value interrogation unit [HIG],” Blair explained at a...

[Click here to listen the 911 call made from a private residence in Springville Utah where a home owner shot and killed an invader.] This series has long argued that there are two parts to armed self-defense. Defending yourself against a lethal threat and defending yourself against prosecution for defending yourself against a lethal threat. Just as the first rule of a gunfight is have a gun, the first rule for staying out of jail and/or losing everything you own due to defensive gun use is STFU (Shut The F Up). That rule starts from the moment you call the...

The modern-day John Adams brigade down at King & Spalding has finally found a client too unpopular to merit representation: the American people. That is exactly the same conclusion drawn by Eric Holder’s Justice Department. Like the DOJ, the Atlanta-based white-shoe law firm asks “How high?” when left-wing agitators tell it to jump. In this instance, the agitators were gay-rights activists. They were in a snit because K&S — in particular, K&S partner Paul Clement, the former Bush-administration solicitor general — agreed to represent the American people in litigation involving challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). DOMA denies...

No matter how grave the circumstances or dangerous the suspects, television detectives Joe Friday and Lennie Briscoe always remembered to do one thing as they slammed the perpetrator against the patrol car: Read him his Miranda rights. But, if new FBI guidelines are allowed to remain unchallenged, Americans' Miranda rights someday could become as fictional as the police dramas that popularized them. Last week, the Wall Street Journal uncovered an FBI memo from October 2010 that encouraged its agents to interrogate terrorism suspects – making no distinction between citizens and noncitizens – without first informing them of their rights to...

New rules allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades. The move is one of the Obama administration's most significant revisions to rules governing the investigation of terror suspects in the U.S. And it potentially opens a new political tussle over national security policy, as the administration marks another step back from pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods. The Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda ruling obligates law-enforcement officials to advise suspects of their rights to...

(PhysOrg.com) -- As NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft made the only close approach to date of our mysterious seventh planet Uranus 25 years ago, Project Scientist Ed Stone and the Voyager team gathered at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to pore over the data coming in. Images of the small, icy Uranus moon Miranda were particularly surprising. Since small moons tend to cool and freeze over rapidly after their formation, scientists had expected a boring, ancient surface, pockmarked by crater-upon-weathered-crater. Instead they saw grooved terrain with linear valleys and ridges cutting through the older terrain and sometimes coming together in...

The Justice Department has a new policy for terrorism interrogations -- but officials won't publicly release it The Obama administration has issued new guidance on use of the Miranda warning in interrogations of terrorism suspects, potentially chipping away at the rule that bars the government from using information in court if it was gathered before a suspect was informed of his right to remain silent and to an attorney. But the Department of Justice is refusing to publicly release the guidance, with a spokesman describing it in an interview as an "internal document." So we don't know the administration's exact interpretation...

Police are winning the unceasing war over the rights of suspected criminals on a major battleground – the Supreme Court of Canada. In a ruling full of friction between a bare majority of judges wanting to avoid hampering officers in their work and a minority fighting for the rights of the accused, the court said on Friday that while suspects have a right to consult a lawyer and to be informed of that right, they don’t have a right to legal counsel while they are being interrogated.

excerpt.. ..the court's conservative majority, the justices ruled 5-4 that unless a suspect explicitly invokes his right not to talk — that is, unless he talks to the police — he's not entitled to remain silent, and any statement he makes can be used against him in court.

Criminal defendants must specifically invoke the right to remain silent under the Miranda rule during questioning to avoid self-incrimination, the Supreme Court said Tuesday. The vote in the case was 5-4 along ideological lines as the court's conservatives put limits on the rights of suspects. Under the Miranda rule, derived from the 1966 Supreme Court decision in Miranda v. Arizona, police may not question a suspect who invokes his right to remain silent—and can't use as evidence incriminating statements obtained after the suspect does so.

The Supreme Court says suspects must explicitly tell police they want to be silent to invoke their Miranda protection during interrogations. A right to remain silent and a right to a lawyer are the first of the Miranda rights warnings, which police recite to suspects during arrests and interrogations. But the justices said Tuesday suspects must tell police they are going to remain silent to stop an interrogation, just as they must tell police that they want a lawyer.

Last week's announcement by Attorney General Eric Holder that he will ask Congress to expand the "public safety" exemption to the Miranda rule as it applies to terror suspects deserves a moment of attention before we move on again to oil spills and immigration. For four decades, liberals have insisted that Miranda and its proscriptions are "part of the Constitution" and that abridging them would mean the beginnings of a police state. Had George Bush, Jr. made this suggestion, it is fair to anticipate that the New York Times probably would have run an eight-column headline screaming, "Bush Proposes Repealing...

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly noted last week that the investigation of the Times Square bombing attempt was in some ways similar to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. He was talking about the police work that nabbed Faisal Shahzad -- but the comment also highlighted the similarity of our government's response then and now. Then came Attorney General Eric Holder's weekend comments about seeking a broader "public safety" exception to the Miranda rule. That agenda shows that he's still too focused on gathering evidence for a court case, when the top priority in such instances should be gathering...

Why is the Obama administration now taking terrorism so seriously? In the immediate aftermath of the May 1 Times Square bombing attempt, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano -- in typical fashion -- rushed to minimize the plot, calling it a likely "one-off" attack. But scarcely a week later, Attorney General Eric Holder is seeking a significant rollback in suspects' Miranda rights -- so as to better head off the next one. Talk about whiplash. President George W. Bush was savaged by Obama's liberal allies for supposedly "shredding the Constitution" in the War on Terror, but he never called into question...

Hmmm. Maybe we could start with not reading them their rights. Recognizing they are Islamic Jihadis out to destroy the country. Maybe we could return to enemy combatants, rather than change Miranda. Maybe. Then again, when you’ve told the world you intend to capture and try these folks in a civilian court under the protections afforded in the US Constitution in order to show the world that we are something that I am not quite sure what we’re supposed to be showing, and then you discover that the old cops and robbers routine doesn’t protect us in war, you have...

In the wake of the Times Square bombing plot, the Obama administration said on Sunday it wants to work with Congress on possible limitations of the constitutional rights afforded terrorism suspects — even for American citizens. Attorney General Eric Holder said changes may be needed to allow law enforcement more time to question suspected terrorists before they are told about their Miranda rights to a lawyer and to remain silent under interrogation. As the nation debates how to proceed against terrorist attacks, particularly as they have become the work of individuals who are difficult to detect in advance, the administration...

"(Law enforcement) interviewed Mr. Shahzad ... under the public safety exception to the Miranda rule. ... He was eventually ... Mirandized and continued talking." -- John Pistole, FBI deputy director, May 4 All well and good. But what if Faisal Shahzad, the confessed Times Square bomber, had stopped talking? When you tell someone he has the right to remain silent, there is a distinct possibility that he will remain silent, is there not? And then what? But let's assume you're wedded to the civilian law-enforcement model, as is the Obama administration. At least make an attempt to expand the public...

Suppose the U.S. Senate passed a law which gives the Federal Government the power to do the following to American citizens who are suspected of a crime: 1.Forbid interrogators from telling the person of their right to remain silent. 2.Forbid interrogators from telling the person of their right to legal counsel. 3.Deny the person habeas corpus protection (the government cannot keep a person in custody without charge). 4.Do all the above not only to a person suspected of a crime, but also to a person who may know about a possible future crime.

Locals severely beat up nine pirates, killing two on the spot, when they were attempting to loot a boat in a remote char area on the river Jamuna in Daulatpur upazila of Manikganj yesterday. Police rescued and arrested seven pirates in a critically injured state. The dead or injured robbers could not be identified immediately. Police also retrieved several machetes and locally made weapons to be used by the pirates. Shawkat Hossain, officer-in-charge of Daulatpur Police Station, said 20 to 25 cattle traders on an engine boat were heading towards a cattle market at Bera in Pabna to buy cows....

Police told Van Chester Thompkins he had a right to remain silent, and so he did. But his silence meant he never officially told officers he wasn't going to talk, and so they kept interrogating him. A couple of hours later, Thompkins implicated himself in a murder. Several Supreme Court justices indicated Monday they were going to let that confession stand, saying suspects should tell police that they want to be silent to take advantage of that Miranda right.