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Regular viewers of Fox News are used to seeing popular host Megyn Kelly on their televisions every afternoon, but on Thursday morning Kelly made a special appearance during the morning to break some surprising information: according to her sources, the FBI was “shocked” to see a magistrate “waltz into” the hospital room of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and read him his Miranda rights. So why were they shocked? According to Kelly, the FBI was under the understanding that they would get much more time with Tsarnaev under the “public safety exemption” before he was read his rights. Adding to the shock: the...

Regular viewers of Fox News are used to seeing popular host Megyn Kelly on their televisions every afternoon, but on Thursday morning Kelly made a special appearance during the morning to break some surprising information: according to her sources, the FBI was “shocked” to see a magistrate “waltz into” the hospital room of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and read him his Miranda rights. So why were they shocked? According to Kelly, the FBI was under the understanding that they would get much more time with Tsarnaev under the “public safety exemption” before he was read his rights. Adding to the shock: the...

Thanks to the "Public Safety Exception" to Miranda (which was created in 1980), the government is not forced to choose between treating a suspect as an enemy combatant or immediately allowing said suspect to hide behind an attorney and the right to remain silent. In extraordinary circumstances, when a suspect is believed to be part of a broader conspiracy that might result in the loss of innocent life, authorities have 48 hours to question the suspect before mirandizing him. Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the man suspected of being a co-conspirator in the Boston Marathon bombings, was mirandized after only 16 hours of...

ACLU Eyes Boston Bombing Suspect's Miranda Rights BOSTON April 20, 2013 The American Civil Liberties Union says it's concerned the surviving Boston Marathon bombing suspect will be questioned by investigators without being read his Miranda rights. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (joh-KAHR' tsahr-NY'-ehv) remained hospitalized Saturday after being wounded in a firefight with police Friday. His brother was killed earlier. U.S. officials say a special interrogation team for high-value suspects will question Tsarnaev without reading him his Miranda rights, invoking a rare public safety exception triggered by the need to protect the public from immediate danger. ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero says the...

The alleged Boston Marathon bomber who hid from authorities for more than 20 hours was captured tonight by police, sending cheers up through the Watertown neighborhood where he was found. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was discovered by a homeowner lying in a boat in the man's backyard around 7 p.m. The man noticed blood on the boat, spotted a body inside the boat and called 911, according to Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis. According to police, a helicopter with infrared technology then located Tsarnaev in the boat and noted that he was moving about within it. The helicopter directed officers on...

Supreme Court on Friday agreed to consider whether a suspect's refusal to answer police questions prior to being arrested and read his rights can be introduced as evidence of guilt at his subsequent murder trial. Without comment, the court agreed to hear the appeal of Genovevo Salinas, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the December 1992 deaths of two brothers in Houston.

Shortly after Hugo Chávez won his first election as Venezuelan president in December 1998, a lawyer from the western state of Barinas, which was then governed by Chávez's father, delivered a prescient warning to Newsweek magazine: "Venezuelans are dreaming of a savior, but Chávez is a dictator. People don't know what they are getting."  More than 14 years later, a cancer-stricken Chávez is reportedly near death, but his autocratic legacy is very much alive. Venezuela long ago ceased to be a real democracy: The ruling regime effectively controls the Supreme Court (which in 2004 was expanded and packed with Chávez allies), the National Assembly...

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...