Content area
Full Text
This Comment examines the application of the public safety exception to Miranda to cases of domestic terrorism, looking particularly at the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. By comparing the Department of Justice's War on Terror policies to the Warren Court's rationale for Miranda, this Comment argues that courts should require law enforcement officers to have reasonable knowledge of an immediate threat to public safety before they may properly invoke the Quarles public safety exception.
Introduction
April 15, 2013. The finish line of the Boston Marathon, on the north side of Boylston Street, on a beautiful spring day.1 It is 2:49 in the afternoon. The race clock reads 4:09:43.2 Suddenly, a boom "like a cannon" erupts.3 Runners and spectators see a "ball of fire," then smoke, glass, debris.4 Thirteen seconds later, a second explosion rips through the crowd five hundred feet away.5 There are people on the ground, limbs scattered, blood everywhere.6 Three spectators lie dead, and nearly two hundred sixty people are strewn, injured.7 Bombs made from two pressure cookers filled with nails and shrapnel.8
April 18, 2013. The FBI is running a multiagency investigation into the bombing.9 It releases images and descriptions of two suspects, soon identified as Chechen-American brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.10 In the pre-dawn hours of the next day, the same two men open fire on a campus police officer on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.11 They carjack an SUV at gunpoint across the Charles River in Allston. A car chase and shootout with police in Watertown follow, during which Tamerlan is killed.12 Dzhokhar escapes in the stolen car.13
April 19, 2013. The entire Boston region is locked down for most of the day. Residents are told not to leave their houses, as law enforcement searches for the missing suspect.14 The lockdown is lifted at dusk. Shortly thereafter, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is found bloody and weakened in a drydocked boat in a Watertown backyard. After a brief standoff, he is taken into custody around 8 P.M.15 He is too injured to speak.16 With official sanction from the Obama Administration, special counterterrorism agents question, but do not Mirandize, Dzhokhar.17 Dzhokhar confesses to planting the bombs with his brother.18 He is questioned in...