Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, captured last Friday evening, was not informed of his right to remain silent and his right to a lawyer until Monday morning, nearly three days after his arrest. The FBI said the delay was justified under the “public safety” exception to Miranda v. Arizona, the 1966 ruling in which the Supreme Court said the now-familiar warnings are required to enforce the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against compelled self-incrimination. But the public-safety exception itself is not justified, which becomes clear when you consider the 1984 decision that announced it.
When Quarles was tried for criminal possession of a weapon, the judge excluded the gun and Quarles’ statements about it from evidence because Kraft began questioning him before he had been Mirandized. Both the Appellate Division and the Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) upheld that decision.
Rehnquist claimed Quarles’ hidden gun posed two possible threats: “An accomplice might make use of it,” or “a customer or employee might later come upon it.” But as dissenting Justice Thurgood Marshall noted, there was no indication that Quarles had an accomplice, and the supermarket was deserted except for the clerks at the checkout counter. Had the police simply searched for the gun, they would have found it easily.
But that insight remains true even in situations involving real threats to public safety, which brings us back to Tsarnaev. While it was plausible that he might have information about imminent threats such as unexploded bombs, that possibility did not make his circumstances any less coercive.
