Heartless psychopaths planted two home-made pressure
cooker bombs loaded jam packed with tiny nails and ball bearings at the finish
line at the Boston Marathon last Monday.
27,000 runners from 96 countries converged on Boston
to run a race repeated every year since 1897.
When the container ripped apart from the exploding
powders within, projecting shrapnel from the torn cooker, hurling nails and
ball bearings indiscriminately, it cut legs, maimed, and even killed three innocents
including an eight year old boy who had just congratulated his Dad on finishing
the long race.
Unaware of any danger, distracted, celebrating a
world-renowned athletic event convened on Patriots
Day, runners, family, and friends
were enjoying a grand race on a day that honors our revolutionary spirit, when our
forbears resisted British rule at the battles of Lexington and Concord.
A momentary and understandable panic enveloped this marvelous
sporting event when first, one bomb, and then another down the street sent powerful
shock waves at ground level, knocking a 78 year old runner to the ground, pumping
clouds of white smoke straight up into the air, transforming the viewing spaces
by the finish line from a crowd of contented onlookers into a scene of screaming
carnage.
A pastor at the ceremonial service afterwards, on this
past Thursday, said he was at a loss to understand where God was on the day of
the twin bombings.
Of course, if we truly have free will, some are free
to choose to kill innocents – as happened that day – and without God’s willing
it.
I’d like to think, however, that there was a divine
will at work, inspiring runners, family, friends, citizens, police, emergency
personnel, doctors, and nurses to run into the smoke of the explosions, without
knowing whether there were other explosions to come, toward the screams of
pain, toward the fallen, undeterred by blood and severed limbs, so that they
could help those in pain and shock.
Some philosophers talk about our connection, one to
the other, and how we will risk our lives for another, even for a complete stranger,
at the risk of our own.
After the investigation that followed, we focused
the nation’s attention on two brothers that the authorities and the relentless news
outlets declared responsible for this inhumane outrage.
One brother is now dead. The surviving younger brother is wounded, in
custody, and recovering at a hospital.
Unfortunately, this is where all that we
accomplished may run off the tracks.
The federal crime that seems to fit the array of
daily news reports is using weapons of mass destruction (18 United States Code
Section 2332a), and the surviving suspect could therefore face a death penalty
if the Attorney General makes that determination; by contrast, Massachusetts
has no death penalty. For the purposes
of this statute, the “weapon” must only be a “destructive device,” defined
elsewhere in the federal code (18 United States Code Section 921), as any
“bomb.”
Some would prefer we charged an act of “terrorism”
(18 United States Code Section 2332b), but we’d have to have “conduct
transcending national boundaries” and, at this writing, there’s no such
evidence.
There are those in the government who insist that a
team of special “interrogators” interview the hospitalized surviving suspect
without telling him he has a right to remain silent.
You all know that an accused in custody has a right
to remain silent. It is true that there
is a Supreme Court case that said, under more narrow circumstances than we have
here, that there can be an exception to advising a person he has a right to
remain silent, a public safety exception.
There are several problems with that.
First, the authorities told the public when the
surviving suspect was arrested that the public was safe. Oops!
Second, you probably can see why this “exception,”
if applied as the government proposes, could engulf the constitutional right to
remain mum in any case involving public safety, like when guns or bombs are
involved.
Third, if the government decides later that it’s a
tad short on evidence, and the Court decides, “you G-men went too far,” then whatever
leads the government follows from what the suspect said, may be thrown out, as
well as whatever he said.
Fourth, this may be a lot of thumb sucking because,
in the end, the hospitalized suspect may not be able to speak, or he may be
smart enough on his own to say that he’d prefer to be silent and have an
attorney advise him who was forthright about his rights.
Some others want to treat our suspect, who is a citizen,
naturalized a year ago, as if he were a war combatant and try him by a military
tribunal. No matter that there is no
evidence that he is a combatant. At
worst, he is a remorseless killer
Boston was unbowed by this tragedy. The people showed great courage.
Our government should show some courage, trust in
the rights of an Accused to choose not to be a witness against himself and to demand
a public trial by his peers.
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