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Showing posts with the label miranda

Does your Miranda "right to remain silent" still exist?

That's the question for this week's Scripps Howard debate between Ben Boychuk and me, asked in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling this week that criminal suspects must speak up to claim their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. My take: The Supreme Court's ruling boils down to this: Police get to assume you don't want your Constitutional rights. The Miranda warning -- the one you've heard cops say on TV a million times -- is now essentially meaningless. "Today's decision turns Miranda upside down," Justice Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. "Suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so." Imagine if the government treated our other Constitutional protections this way. Federal agents would be free to shut down church services unless prayer was preceded by a pastor's public statement that churchgoers were exercising their First Amendment ri