Obama legal team wants to limit rights
Find a Conversation
| Sun, 04-26-2009 - 1:09am |
The One seems to have decided we have too many rights. I wonder if our Supreme Court will agree?
The story is here - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090424/ap_on_go_su_co/us_obama_defendants__rights
Obama legal team wants to limit defendants' rights
The Obama administration is asking the Supreme Court to overrule a 23 year-old decision that stopped police from initiating questions unless a defendant's lawyer is present, the latest stance that has disappointed civil rights and civil liberties groups.
While President Barack Obama has reversed many policies of his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, the defendants' rights case is another stark example of the White House seeking to limit rather than expand rights.
Since taking office, Obama has drawn criticism for backing the continued imprisonment of enemy combatants in Afghanistan without trial, invoking the "state secrets" privilege to avoid releasing information in lawsuits and limiting the rights of prisoners to test genetic evidence used to convict them.
The case at issue is Michigan v. Jackson, in which the Supreme Court said in 1986 that police may not initiate questioning of a defendant who has a lawyer or has asked for one unless the attorney is present. The decision applies even to defendants who agree to talk to the authorities without their lawyers.
Anything police learn through such questioning may not be used against the defendant at trial. The opinion was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the only current justice who was on the court at the time.
The justices could decide as early as Friday whether they want to hear arguments on the issue as they wrestle with an ongoing case from Louisiana that involves police questioning of an indigent defendant that led to a murder confession and a death sentence.
The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, said the 1986 decision "serves no real purpose" and offers only "meager benefits." The government said defendants who don't wish to talk to police don't have to and that officers must respect that decision. But it said there is no reason a defendant who wants to should not be able to respond to officers' questions.
At the same time, the administration acknowledges that the decision "only occasionally prevents federal prosecutors from obtaining appropriate convictions."
The administration's legal move is a reminder that Obama, who has moved from campaigning to governing, now speaks for federal prosecutors.
The administration's position assumes a level playing field, with equally savvy police and criminal suspects, lawyers on the other side of the case said. But the protection offered by the court in Stevens' 1986 opinion is especially important for vulnerable defendants, including the mentally and developmentally disabled, addicts, juveniles and the poor, the lawyers said.
"Your right to assistance of counsel can be undermined if somebody on the other side who is much more sophisticated than you are comes and talks to you and asks for information," said Sidney Rosdeitcher, a New York lawyer who advises the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Stephen B. Bright, a lawyer who works with poor defendants at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said the administration's position "is disappointing, no question."
Bright said that poor defendants' constitutional right to a lawyer, spelled out by the high court in 1965, has been neglected in recent years. "I would hope that this administration would be doing things to shore up the right to counsel for poor people accused of crimes," said Bright, whose group joined with the Brennan Center and other rights organizations in a court filing opposing the administration's position.
Former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson and former FBI Director William Sessions are among 19 one-time judges and prosecutors urging the court to leave the decision in place because it has been incorporated into routine police practice and establishes a rule on interrogations that is easy to follow.
Eleven states also are echoing the administration's call to overrule the 1986 case.
Justice Samuel Alito first raised the prospect of overruling the decision at arguments in January over the rights of Jesse Montejo, the Louisiana death row inmate.
Montejo's lawyer, Donald Verrilli, urged the court not to do it. Since then, Verrilli has joined the Justice Department, but played no role in the department's brief.

Sensationalizing the Right to Counsel Case
Complete piece at link.......
http://www.poligazette.com/2009/04/26/sensationalizing-the-right-to-counsel-case/
>"Whew! Seems that reversing Jackson wouldn’t actually end the representation of defendants by layers, but sets rules on how the police may question that person after they’ve requested representation. Yet, if I’d just gone with the knee-jerk reaction, I might have thought otherwise and been more worried than necessary.
Ed writes after quoting the article:
Rolling back Michigan v Jackson would be a mistake. People who ask for an attorney should get one without further questioning. Americans have the right to counsel at all stages of the process, not just in court, as Obama argues. The adversarial process begins with arrest and interrogation, not when people first face a judge. While Miranda has been turned into a fetish, Michigan actually does the work Miranda promises — to get people counsel when they most need it. That does serve a real purpose, despite what Obama argues.
But the right to a representation is already enshrined in the sixth amendment as it was written. What Jackson does is prevent police from interrogating a defendant until the accused has their representation by their side. It doesn’t establish the specific right to representation in certain circumstances. Actually, an earlier ruling, Brewer v. Williams (1977), did this. And Edwards v. Alabama was the first put Miranda into motion, though for the fifth amendment. While I have problems with parts of Jackson, I think the ruling as a whole is sound. So, I disagree with the Obama administration that Jackson doesn’t “serve a real purpose,” but do agree with their argument that the ruling appears to deny the right of the defendant to dismiss their lawyer and represent themselves after they initially request counsel.
I wanted to know more about the current case, Jackson, and the history of sixth amendment related cases, so I went to study them for a bit and then wrote an analysis article about it earlier today. That’s how I came to the conclusion that Americans were not going to be stripped of their right to representation, even if Jackson is rolled back. So, there’s no need for sensationalizing the case to claim that a wrong decision is going to do things it won’t. Yet, I can hardly blame Ed. After all, the left went wild when detainees at Guantanamo Bay were denied the writ of habeas corpus. The liberals shouted at the top of their lungs that this somehow extended to American citizens. That wasn’t true, but facts be damned, right?"<
U.S. Constitution: Sixth Amendment
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment06/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Thanks...you not only beat me to this, you had a better response!