You Have the Right to Remain Silent

This morning I spent an hour debating David Cole of Georgetown on Wisconsin Public Radio. The question was whether we should read Miranda rights to suspected terrorists. Not a lot of sparks. I tend to believe that the public safety exception to Miranda should be broad enough to include (in some way that requires further definition) questioning undertaken to protect the public from an ongoing terrorist operation or to determine that there is no such ongoing operation. I don’t agree that Miranda is completely off the table just because the suspected charge is terrorism. While Professor Cole wants a more immediate geographically bound exception that I’d draft, the devil is in the details.

On more fundamental level, it doesn’t seem that deferring Miranda rights is among the most difficult legal trade-offs in the war on terror. Both its value to national security and its imposition on the rights of suspects is limited.

I would have preferred to discuss  Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, a case currently pending before the Supreme Court in which Professor Cole represents the plaintiffs.

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Self-Defense: Sending a Moral Message

What kind of message should the law send when it comes to a woman who kills a man who has been abusing, assaulting, or threatening her?

“I think it is important that we send the right moral message in the law,” Joshua Dressler, a respected authority on criminal law and procedure said in a lecture at the Marquette University Law School. 

In the annual Barrock Lecture at the Law School last week, Dressler said that even as some feminists advocate for expanding what is justifiable under the label of self-defense, the law should proceed cautiously. 

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Capital Punishment and the Contemporary Cinema

American cinema of the last century includes a large number of films with major characters on death row.  James Hogan’s silent film “Capital Punishment,” for example, screened in 1925.  During the 1950s, the death penalty was at the forefront in such respected films as Fritz Lang’s “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” (1956), Robert Wise’s “I Want to Live” (1958), and Howard Koch’s “The Last Mile” (1959).  The late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw an even greater number of films inviting contemplation of the death penalty.

The latter flurry of films perhaps relates to the period’s especially pronounced campaign to end capital punishment.  In keeping with the often-heard assertion that Hollywood leans to the left politically, most of these films seem opposed to the death penalty.  Some express their opposition in the fashion of a “message film,” while others proffer more subtle dramatic narratives.

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