Our Constitution has no emergency exceptions in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights always applies, period.
Let me remind readers of why we had the Miranda decision. We have a biographic statement of a retired Supreme Court justice in evidence. The issue was not some abstract right to counsel. The issue was that in large parts of the United States police investigation consisted of deciding who was to be found guilty and beating them until they confessed. The Supreme Court concluded that torture was unAmerican, and found an approach for dealing with the matter.
Many Americans got their jollies out of the thought of accused persons, especially persons darker in skin shade than themselves, being beaten, and were wrongly aggrieved that the Supreme Court had shut them down. These people, who are now the core of the Republican Party, have for decades been looking for a way to revoke Miranda so they could go back to the days of the third degree. Now terrorism is giving them the excuse they needs. The torturers and their legal protectors begin at the top with the current and immediately past Presidents, their Attorney Generals, their CIA directors, their Secretaries of the Air Force -- those rendition planes did not fly themselves -- and on down through the ranks.
On the matter of the emergency exception I quote with permission my good friend Tom Knapp http://knappster.blogspot.com/.... He wrote (below the fold)
"The "public safety exception" is bullshit in the first place, but even were it permissible it is intended to apply only to circumstances of immediate danger.
"No such circumstances exist. They've caught the guy. He's in custody and his alleged accomplice is dead, and they had Boston and environs on (completely illegal) "lockdown" prior to his capture.
"They're just continuing to roll the dice on a week-long project to see how much totalitarian lawlessness they can get away with.
"The response to the Boston Marathon attack has so far been a near-complete victory for Islamist terrorists, and treating Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as anything other than a run-of-the-mill criminal suspect is just continuing to give them (and their allies, the "neoconservatives" and other authoritarian interventionists) exactly what they want."
So how should the prosecutor handle any trial needed? "Your client is a common murderer. He is being tried as a common murderer, and if convicted will hopefully spend the rest of a long life contemplating the error of his ways."