More assaults on your civil rights.

If you don’t care, you’re tacitly consenting:

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Supreme Court Reviewing Suspects’ Rights Cases
By Dean Schabner

Oct. 15 — In a police practice some say is increasingly common, a St. Louis officer held off reading a suspect her Miranda rights until he got her to admit she played a role in setting a fire that killed a young boy. Then he read her her rights, and convinced her to confess again.

Why? Because he thought, correctly as it turned out, that suspect Patrice Seibert would be more likely to make incriminating statements before she knew of her rights, and then it would be easy enough to get her to repeat the confession after she’d been “Mirandized,” as the law requires.

Seibert’s first confession in the 1997 fire that killed Donald Rector was not admissible as evidence. But her taped reiteration of the confession was used in her trial to help convict her of second-degree murder and get her a life sentence.

The St. Louis County police officer who interrogated Seibert testified he intentionally did not tell her of her rights, and said he had been told not to in order to get a confession that could be used to get her to talk even after she knew she had the right to remain silent.

Some lawyers say the practice is growing in popularity among police, and the courts are taking a closer look.

The Missouri Supreme Court, for instance, threw out Seibert’s conviction in December 2002, ruling in a 4-3 decision the taped confession, which was played for the jury, was inadmissible. The state has since asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the issue.

The case, Missouri v. Seibert, is just one of eight the Supreme Court is hearing this term that look at police proceedings in criminal investigations.

The high court is seeking either to make a mark on how law enforcement operates when it comes to Miranda and Fourth Amendment rights, say legal experts, or as preparation for cases arising from the war on terror expected to begin making their way through the courts in the coming years.

“That [the war on terror issue] is definitely the ghost at the banquet in all this,” said Kermit Hall, president of Utah State University and a professor of history there.

Either way, though, lawyers and legal scholars say the cases should have meaning not just to criminals but…

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