DN Editorial: DN Editorial: Give Boston bombing suspect his fair trial
The triumph of American spirit exhibited after the Boston bombings has already been sullied by misguided politicians.
IT'S SADLY predictable that the triumph of American spirit and skill exhibited in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings would be sullied almost immediately by myopic and misguided Washington politicians.
Several GOP U.S. senators, led by John McCain and Lindsey Graham, urged the Obama administration to label 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an "enemy combatant," which would suspend his constitutional rights to legal protections guaranteed to all criminal defendants.
If so classified, Tsarnaev could have been held indefinitely by the military and interrogated extensively without a lawyer, despite the fact that he's an American citizen who can't be tried by a military commission. Thankfully, the White House stood its ground and declared Monday that the alleged bomber would not be held as an enemy combatant. Instead, he was charged in federal court with using a weapon of mass destruction.
But Justice Department officials also withheld Tsarnaev's Miranda warnings, invoking the public-safety exception that permits questioning a suspect to determine whether he has links to terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda and can provide information to prevent future attacks. This despite the fact that Boston officials have pretty much concluded he and his brother acted alone. There's no evidence that Tsarnaev is affiliated with any organized terrorist organization.
The inescapable conclusion, then, is that the pressure to label him an enemy combatant and withhold his fundamental rights is based on nothing other than the fact that he's Muslim and foreign-born. That impulse is as ugly as the American response to Boston was awe-inspiring.
Not to mention that other GOP leaders have invoked the Boston bombings - and the fact that Tsarnaev's Chechen parents received asylum under U.S. immigration laws - as a reason to reconsider the hard-won immigration-reform bill now under Senate consideration. Sens. Charles Grassley and Rand Paul were among Republican lawmakers who raised the specter of retreat from pending legislation that would provide a path to legality for about 11 million people.
It would be a grievous mistake if an aftershock of the Boston bombing toppled this effort. As Andrew O'Hehir wrote on Salon.com, "It's hard to imagine what possible immigration laws could have categorically excluded them [the Tsarnaevs], short of a magic anti-Muslim force field."
Our objection to suspending Tsarnaev's constitutional rights isn't about sympathy for him. It's about withstanding the emotional vigilante impulse the violence he is accused of provokes and guaranteeing the civil rights, including the right of due process, of every American, no matter how noxious and notorious. That is what distinguishes us as a civilized country.
In the pre-9/11 world, Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was tried in federal court for murdering 168 people and wounding more than 600. In the post-9/11 world, underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was tried and convicted in civilian court of trying to blow up a passenger jet in 2009. There's no reason to have proceeded otherwise with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.