In what may be a landmark Supreme Court case to overturn the Miranda
decision, the court is scheduled to hear arguments from Solicitor
General Theodore Olsen on December 4, 2002.
Bush's political appointee intends to claim our government has the
right to coerce information from a witness, as long as the evidence
obtained isn't used at trial against the witness.
The landmark 1966 Miranda v. Arizona decision ruled that suspects
could not be interrogated without first being advised of their rights
to remain silent and to obtain an attorney. The wording of Miranda is
familiar to all Americans who watch TV, and is assumed as a basic
right. The Justice Department wants to change all that.
In other words, Olsen plans to argue the police can detain or arrest
anyone for any reason and then beat you up or even shoot you to get
information, even if there are no emergent circumstances.
In other countries, this is called torture. In our country, we have
the 5th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution designed to prevent such
horrendous abuses by the police.
What events could possibly lead Bush to champion a police state over
liberty? In the case, Chavez v. Martinez, the U.S. government
supports a police officer who interrogated a man the police shot 5
times, once in the face. The injured man also demanded that the
questioning stop, but the officer continued his interrogation until
the injured man fell into unconsciousness.
Interestingly, the police and the United States don't argue the facts
of the case. Five years ago, Oliver Martinez was riding his bike
down a path when he came upon two police officers questioning another
man. The officers ordered Martinez to stop, forcibly stopped him,
frisked him, wrestled him to the ground, and then shot him five times
at point-blank range. Martinez was blinded and paralyzed and
screamed for medical care.
What the police did next will shock you even more. A police officer,
Sergeant Ben Chavez, kept the injured passerby in police custody.
Chavez climbed into the ambulance with the paralyzed and blind man
and interrogated him for 45 minutes in the ambulance and at the
hospital. Chavez tape recorded the injured man's pleas to leave him
alone and stop questioning him.
Chavez tried in vain to get Martinez to incriminate himself by
confessing he was doing something more than riding his bike in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Yes, Martinez, a farm laborer,
possessed a knife.
Chavez wanted to "clear" his fellow police officers of wrongfully
shooting a passerby. Chavez tried over and over again to coerce
Martinez into saying he tried to take one of the police officer's
weapons. Then the officers would have had grounds to shoot Martinez.
If anything, the police were trying to cover up their own abusive
practices. Yet none of the officers involved have ever been
reprimanded.
After the incident, Martinez hired an attorney and sued the police
for illegal arrest, use of excessive force, and coercive
interrogation while in police custody. Though he was shot five times,
no charges were ever filed against him, and the police department
never provided any assistance or compensation.
This horrific story becomes more amazing when the Bush Administration
sided with the abusive police. Bush, through Olsen, makes the
argument there is no constitutional guarantee against coercive police
questioning, even when medical personnel are telling the police to
move back.
In other words, Bush says it is okay for the police to grab citizens
off the street, shoot them, question them without an attorney, keep
medical assistance away, and try to cover up a police shooting with
impunity.
In essence, Bush says beat them and shoot them, because the ends
justify the means.
Bush says "trust us," we won't use the tainted confessions in court.
If the court rules in Chavez' favor, what will the Bush
Administration's policy mean for innocent bystanders who are picked
up by the police for being near a crime scene or merely walking down
the street?
Will innocent civilians, under the Patriot Act and the Homeland
Security Act and the end of Miranda warning, have to submit to a
beating before they get their one phone call?
Has the U.S. political leadership in Washington, DC gone crazy?
And, I ask, why is this news, and the broad impact it may have on
liberty, limited to the Los Angeles Times and the alternative press?
The Bush Administration is expanding the power of the police and
assaulting our civil liberties with a hatchet. Yet Congress, TV, and
major newspapers, aren't watching and reporting.
If Bush wins this case, America may plunge into our darkest hour. To
paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, "It is happening here."
Now is the time to stand up and stop these horrors, before President
Bush completes his plan to turn America into a police state, where
anyone, anywhere, can be picked up off the street, shot, beaten,
questioned without an attorney, and not told why we are in custody.
Charles Sheehan-Miles, a Gulf War veteran and a co-founder of Veterans for
Common Sense and former President of the National Gulf War Resource Center, is
the author of Prayer at Rumayla (XLibris, 2001). He can be contacted at http://www.sheehanmiles.com
Some links about the case:
The Department of Justice's petition to the U.S. Supreme Court:
http://www.usdoj.gov/osg/briefs/2002/3mer/1ami/2001-1444.mer.ami.html
Los Angeles Times: High Court to Hear Miranda Challenge
http://www.latimes.com/la-na-miranda24nov24,0,1038975.story
Miranda v. Arizona, U.S. Supreme Court, 1966
http://www.lectlaw.com/files/case04.htm
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