The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
The Sounds of Silence
Van Chester Thompkins murdered Samuel Morris by shooting him in Southfield, Mich. Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction, turning aside his claim that police had violated his Miranda rights. As CNN reports:
In a 5-4 ruling, the court said a suspect must explicitly tell officers he or she is asserting that right, known as Miranda rights. . . .
“A suspect who has received and understood the Miranda warnings, and has not invoked his Miranda rights, waives the right to remain silent by making an uncoerced statement to police,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by three other justices (if you guess who they are, you will be correct), wrote a vigorous dissent from the court’s ruling in Berghuis v. Thompkins:
Today’s decision turns Miranda upside down. Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent–which, counterintuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so.
There’s something screwy about Sotomayor’s logic.The court did not hold that Thompkins could be compelled to speak, only that he had to speak up in order to exercise his right to end the interrogation, which is a corollary to the right to remain silent. Having failed to do so, he still had every right to remain silent–a right he could easily have exercised by remaining silent.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.
