Suspects Caught & The Road To Justice Begins

The men pictured above are Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It took the combined police agencies of the federal, state, and local governments less than a week to identify them as the suspects in the Boston marathon bombings. Both have now been apprehended -- with Tamerlan being killed during his stand-off with the police, and Dzhokhar is in the hospital with serious injuries. This is a good thing, and I join the people of Boston and America in applauding the way the various police agencies worked together to catch the suspected culprits.

But I have to disagree with the spokesman for the state police who said that justice has been done. While the suspects are no longer at large, the road to true justice is just getting started. I hope Dzhokhar does survive his wounds, because there needs to be a trial -- so the victims of the disaster can get a bit of closure, and so it can be demonstrated to the world that the right men were apprehended and given a fair trial.

And a fair trial is required. It bothers me some that the president has invoked the "public safety" exemption to the Miranda warning -- giving policing agencies the right to question Dzhokhar without reading him the Miranda warning. There doesn't seem to be any real question of public safety here, since it is pretty obvious the two brothers acted alone -- and without financial or other help from outside sources (since they had to try to rob a convenience store and steal a car to try to escape, and their bombs were not sophisticated).

It seems to me that it is now far more important to rigidly adhere to the rule of law, to show the world that even terrorists are treated fairly in American courts -- by giving the Miranda warning, providing the suspect an attorney, and insuring that he gets a fair trial (with all the rights that anyone else in this country would get). It may feel good for many in this country to deny this suspect his basic constitutional rights, but that's not justice -- it's retribution or revenge.

Don't get me wrong. If Dzhokhar is guilty (and I believe he probably is), then I hope he is convicted and punished as severely as possible. But we must do it the right way. The rule of law is too important to every American to be tossed away because a suspect is hated by nearly everyone. That is just the kind of defendant the constitutional amendments were designed to protect from government malfeasance (the popular people will always get their rights respected and protected). And if any right can be withheld from this defendant, then it can also be withheld from anyone else in this country, anytime the government wants to do it.

The world is watching. Will we uphold the rule of law and give this defendant a fair trial, or will we embarrass ourselves (and jeopardize our own rights) -- the way we have treated the inmates at Guantanamo (who have been denied lawyers, charges, or fair trails)? Labeling someone as a terrorist should not make them any different from any other criminal suspect. The people of this country need to realize that rights are either for everyone or they are not for anyone. Those who wrote the Constitution knew that, and it is up to us to re-affirm it.