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miranda in texas

people, this is scary... i found out this morning that in Texas, you don't have to be read your rights upon arrest and that the things you say can and will be held against you.

the magistrate reads you your rights AFTER you've spent the night in jail. read the following that i pulled from this web site (http://www.soddi.com/Process2.htm) about williamson county:

Your Miranda Rights

The most important rights guaranteed to a person accused of crime are:

The right to remain silent;
The right not to be compelled to give evidence against oneself;
The right to an attorney prior to and during any questioning by police or attorneys for the State;
The right to terminate any interview with law enforcement personnel at any time.

The most important aspect of your Miranda rights, as you can see from the above, is that you don't have to tell the police anything at all. Regardless of what the police officer says -- that you will be helping yourself if you "tell the truth," that you will make it easier on yourself if you confess, etc. -- your best defense at this point is to REMAIN SILENT!

If you simply must tell your story to the police, wait until you have had an opportunity to tell it to an attorney, and get counsel's advice before handing your head to the prosecutor on a platter. It may take several days for you to get an attorney, but the advice of counsel is worth more than a couple of days in jail. "Telling the truth" to the police will not get you out of jail any sooner. In fact, if the truth is that you are not guilty, you go to jail anyway; if the truth is that you are guilty, you go to jail for a longer period of time!"

now, riddle me this, batman... if the supreme court ruling in 1966 arizona v. miranda ruled that the police are to advise you of your rights *upon arrest* how is it that texas is getting away with not reading them until after you've been in jail overnight?

even worse, in june of this year, a challenge to miranda (stemming from a 1968 ruling that seemed to conflict) was shot down 7-2 (http://www.aclu.org/news/2000/n062600b.html)

from the lawyer who argued the case:
"'The ACLU has always believed, and the court today agreed, that effective law enforcement does not and should not depend on keeping people ignorant of their rights," said Steven R. Shapiro, Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a friend- of-the-court brief in the case."

and yet, in consulting with a laywer this morning, this is still not true in Austin, Texas year 2000 and i can't seem to find out why that is. does anyone know?

the tragic, sad, brave life of Martin Niemoller

He is an object of fierce controversy on the Web. Everyone wants to make Niemöller "their Niemöller," spun their own way. (For example, he is a hero of anti-abortionists. One of his champions is born-again evangelist Charles Colson, a senior official of the Nixon White House who was a central mover in the worst crimes of Watergate, and who did a nice chunk of prison time for it.) Few of the sites about Niemöller are what you might call "objective" or "non-partisan."

But through the fog of the wrestling match for your mind, some interesting and uncontested facts emerge about what was clearly a most remarkable and courageous man. This seems to be the most authoritative version of his famous quote, which some post as a poem. Of course a part of the "fuzz" about the quote is that it was undoubtedly first spoken in German and then translated. (The Italians say: Traditore, Tradutore -- Translator, Traitor):

According to Harry W. Mazal, the exact text of what Martin Niemöller said, and which appears in the Congressional Record, 14 October 1968, page 31636, is:

When Hitler attacked the Jews, I was not a Jew, therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the Catholics, I was not a Catholic, and therefore I was not concerned. And when Hitler attacked the unions and the industrialists, I was not a member of the unions and I was not concerned. Then Hitler attacked me and the Protestant church -- and there was nobody left to be concerned.

Niemöller's great tragedy seems to be chiefly that the Nazis were clearer and faster in doing what they wanted to do than Niemöller and his fellow young Protestant ministers were in responding to the Nazi programs. His tragedy and failure to resist Nazism early and in time, with the finest elements of Christianity at his disposal, is disturbingly like Yeats' "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction; the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Niemöller was a decorated U-boat commander during World War I; it seems that he embraced pacifism itself only after his liberation from Dachau and the end of World War II. (I don't know how you say "Oops!" in German.)

In 1924 he became a Lutheran minister and served as pastor of a well-to-do Berlin suburb. He was an early supporter of Hitler, and the Nazi press pointed to him as a model for his patriotic military service in World War I [Newsweek 10 July 1937, or so one webpage cites].

In 1933, the Nazi Nuremburg laws authorizing (among other things) enforced sterilization for many classes of people convinced him that Nazism was anti-Christ and anti-Christian, and that in fact the Nazis were trying to turn Germany into a revival of ancient Teutonic paganism, with ritual human sacrifice as its centerpiece.

It apparently became clear to him at this time that Christianity, as he understood it, and Nazism could not survive together in Germany; no matter how the Nazis tried to put a Christian label or costume on their ideas and programs, Niemöller realized that what was being sold to the German people was a faith that was profoundly opposed to Christianity and was intent on destroying it.

Very promptly, Protestant pastors expressing sentiments along these lines started to be arrested and imprisoned, and Niemöller founded an organization of about 3,000 pastors, The Pastors' Emergency League, to defend pastors from these government attacks. He also helped found the anti-Nazi groups The Barmen Synod and The Confessional Church. These organizations were among the roots that eventually evolved into the domestic resistance to the Nazis during World War II.

He continued to preach his ideas publicly, knowing that soon nothing could protect him from arrest. In one of his most famous last sermons, he said he "would rather burn his church to the ground than to preach the Nazi trinity of 'race, blood and soil.'"

In 1937 he was charged with treason and spent the war in two concentration camps, Sachsenhausen and Dachau. His more famous Lutheran pastor friend and active resistance member, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was executed. Niemöller miraculously survived and lived to be 92. After the war he authored a famous doctrine attesting to the responsibility of the German Protestant clergy for the rise of the Nazis, toured the world to speak about his experiences, and served in the highest positions of international Protestant organizations. Among many awards was the Lenin Peace Prize, the Soviet Union's version of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Far less classy than Niemöller or Yeats, nevertheless I think Niemöller's sad and yet great life can best be described by this Pennsylvania Dutch saying:

We get too soon old, and too late smart.

He seems to have been a very ordinary man, initially not prone to over-thinking, forced by the most bizarre and ghastly circumstances to become extraordinary. It is not a crime or a sin to be ordinary; most of us are, and the rest of us often wish desperately and bitterly that we could be. It is certainly the sweetest of all the gifts of fate to be allowed to live an ordinary life in ordinary times, and it wasn't Niemoller's fault that his times were so horrifyingly far from ordinary.

Niemöller was one of the few people in these circumstances to become extraordinary, but a little too slowly to help Germany or himself. His famous quote is the best possible assessment of his life, no detractor could possibly say anything more candidly damning about him.

---

So I think we have to look at Niemöller's life and wonder if we in America in 2000 are encountering something parallel and similar to the early rise of the Nazi programs.

Of course we're Americans and it's a disgusting question. We ought immediately and totally to reject it. It could not possibly be true.

But Niemöller's experience suggests that, if we're wrong, we don't and won't have much time to do anything about a Very Ghastly and Huge National Mistake; very soon, if not already, it will be much too late to turn it around.

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

-- Oliver Cromwell, letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 1650

In my post about our 2,000,000 prisoners a week or so ago, the one you wondered about and about which I referred you to the Angela Davis essay, there is the very troubling question of how The Land of the Free now leads the world -- beyond China, beyond Russia -- in prisoners, of how this happened. You very insightfully wondered if America really has 2,000,000 serial killers.

The desire to live safely, to be largely if not entirely free from fear of violence or predation or intimidation, is a perfectly valid, ancient, even moral desire. I would not trade any of my Utopian notions of justice or morality for a truly dangerous and threatening community.

The question is, how have our politicians and policymakers treated our normal, healthy, natural desires to feel and be safe? Have they responded to it rationally and sincerely and in the highest traditions of public service?

Or have they pandered to it in the lowest and most insincere ways for cheap votes and perpetual re-election? I think, since the END of the Nixon administration, this is the conscious (but backroom and secret) choice our public officials have made. (Nixon, astonishingly, championed an emphasis on medical treatment and scientific research for addiction, and specifically did not use imprisonment as "our response of first choice," as Angela Davis describes our policies since Nixon.)

Droog4
Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep:
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/

posted by charlotte for Droog4

By segregating people labeled as criminals, prison simultaneously fortifies and conceals the structural racism of the U.S. economy. Claims of low unemployment rates -- even in black communities -- make sense only if one assumes that the vast numbers of people in prison have really disappeared and thus have no legitimate claims to jobs. The numbers of black and Latino men currently incarcerated amount to 2 percent of the male labor force. According to criminologist David Downes, "Treating incarceration as a type of hidden unemployment may raise the jobless rate for men by about one-third, to 8 percent. The effect on the black labor force is greater still, raising the [black] male unemployment rate from 11 percent to 19 percent."
US CT: OPED: Reflections On The Prison Industrial Complex

Salon.com Politics | Everything you need to know about the Florida recount

And Now for Something Not Entirely Different

... inspired by this piece from Salon.

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1685.a07.html

As you probably know, my personal vacuum cleaner is the War on Drugs and its ghastly racist, ethnic-cleansing consequences.

Both Bush and Gore took the identical robotic line of once again ratcheting up the War on Drugs -- more cops, more prosecutors, more prisons — THIS time they promised to REALLY get tough on drugs!

At this writing, the election has come down to Gore shrieking and having a cataleptic fit over a difference of 370 Florida votes.

The Salon guy very nicely points out that one third of adult African-American men in Florida are permanently disenfranchised, they can never vote again, because of felony convictions, most of them drug-related.

I voted Nader/Green; I think both Bush and Gore are equally corrupt, clueless and dangerous for the USA and the world.

But if Gore — whose Democratic birthright is African-American votes — loses, I hope he chokes on his party's contribution to the resurrection of Jim Crow in the Sunbelt. (And everywhere else except, thanks to California's voters, Prop 36!!!)

Gore — our thoughtful, caring, liberal candidate — had the chance to gently and cautiously call for a new direction in drug policy, but his white soccer mom suburban focus groups kept telling him that what the folks want is to keep locking up those scary icky black and Hispanic people. So that's what he and his predecessors of both parties have done for the last 20 years, and that's why he's screaming and freaking out over 370 ballots.

Your Noted Expert on Constitutional Law,

Droog4
Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep:
http://www.javanet.com/~bobmer/

posted by charlotte for Droog4