T-Shirt Tuesday: Get Your Miranda Rights On Your Chest
One week ago, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling that changed the way Miranda rights work. Silence is no longer an adequate indication you wish to invoke your right to remain silent, thus triggering an end to police interrogation. Instead, an accused person "who wants to invoke his or her right to remain silent [must] to do so unambiguously." Read Reason's Steve Chapman on the case here.
Tom W. Bell of the Technology Liberation Front blog has responded sartorially:
I guess that you could say the Berghuis majority took a cue from the (so-called) libertarian paternalists and engaged in some legal nudging. In this case, however, the Court nudged our defaults away from individual liberty and toward prosecutorial power. Call it statist paternalism.
Thanks, Supremes, for giving us worse than nothing. Ah, well. As I read Berghuis, even the justices in the majority would not deny us the opportunity to answer their new default with a firm "No!" Thus might we recover our Constitutional rights with a t-shirt.
Buy your shirt here.
