(June 27, 2022 at 12:17 am)Rev. Rye Wrote: Something worth noting, in practice, the Miranda warnings themselves are often useless. Why? As Anyone who’s seen enough interrogation videos on YouTube knows, a lot of the time, the perps don’t heed that warning. They just go ahead like nothing happened. Hell, sometimes, even after they get their lawyer, they end up digging their own graves anyway:
That certainly happens, nobody is denying that.
But we are not talking about someone who has been warned. We are talking about police questioning someone for hours w/o reading Miranda to intimidate and lead a suspect and get them to falsely confess, and only then do they read Miranda. That also happens and a lot more than people realize.
Miranda isn't there solely for the guilty. It is a long term quality control principle to minimize any trampling of rights of the society as a whole long term. The idea is to prevent societal zeitgeist from leading to a vigilante government. Innocent people do end up in prison, and a lot more than you think.
Again, keep in mind that a government public defender does not have the same budget as the prosecutor, nowhere close. On top of that public defenders have impossible case loads and cannot spend the same amount of time defending a client as say a rich person with a fleet of lawyers. And most of the cases that end up with an innocent person being convicted, are never stories that go national.
I always stand by the principle "It is better to let 10 guilty people go free, than to convict one innocent person.".
We have had a history of mob law and mob courts. Especially with minorities. There was a time in American history where all it took to throw a black person in jail, or lynch them, was to simply falsely accuse them. Back then, the law were racist in countless districts, the prosecutor was racist, the judge was racist, and the jury was racist. And even today, our justice system still on average hurts black and brown poor people at a far higher rate than whites for similar offenses.
Not being able to hold police accountable for abuse is a very dangerous precedent and allowing that floodgate to widen the target field. If you have ever heard of Martin Miemoller "First they came after". This isn't going to stop with guns, it isn't going to stop with abortion, and it isn't going to stop with Miranda. Our GOP went from mere principled disagreement with others, to flat out fascism.
I do not like saying that, it deeply pains me to say that, but we are looking at a growing possibility that, knowing that in our system the pendulum always swings back and forth over time as far as power. I fear that if when the GOP gets all three branches once again, the pendulum will get stuck on their side, and our system will no longer have any meaning and will be for all practical purposes be dead.
