Following a heated public debate about the legality of withholding suspected terrorist Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Miranda rights, the Obama administration decided Monday to charge and try the suspect in the criminal courts, refusing to classify him as an enemy combatant.
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R- SC) lead a vocal contingent of lawmakers pushing to hold Tsarnaev as a military detainee, thereby suspending his right to an attorney and his right to remain silent, among others, while the government ‘gathered intelligence’ from the suspect ostensibly linking him to al Qaeda.
Tsarnaev is being charged with using a weapon of mass destruction and one count of malicious destruction of property resulting in death. Thanks to Monday’s White House decision to forgo the ‘public safety exception’ that would have allowed the suspect to be interrogated without any personal rights, he will be tried domestically before an impartial jury just like any other run-of-the-mill criminal.
The longest public safety exception case upheld a 50-minute delay. Since Tsarnaev’s law-breaking occurred as a series of bombings and shoot-outs over five days, the Justice Department- which has little to no evidence that Tsarnaev is affiliated with a designated enemy terrorist organization- does not have much ground to invoke that statute.
Though the decision will certainly inflame many who feel Tsarnaev’s radical terrorist activities should disqualify him from his constitutional rights, others will likely laud the president. As Emily Bazelon noted in her op-ed on the subject: “When the law gets bent out of shape for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.”
Laws that allow terrorists to be tried by military commissions apply only to those terrorists explicitly linked to al Qaeda, the Taliban, or similar forces with which the United States is already at war. The charges levied against the 19-year-old, who earned his American citizenship on September 11th, 2011, both carry the maximum punishment of death.
George Washington University’s John Paul Koenigs contributed to this report.
