Perhaps the state of Ohio should be renamed the Black Eye State instead of the Buckeye state, thanks to a recent ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court. The ruling, by a 6-1 super majority (apparently there is only one person left in Ohio who doesn’t want to completely punch Liberty in the eyeball), overturned a lower court ruling that dismissed evidence gained by police on the grounds that it was gathered through an interview in a police car with the defendant.
The ruling happened Wednesday, August 16th, 2017, and what it essentially means is that unless the police take you to a specific type of space – an interrogation room – and ask you enough questions (whatever that is, because the court doesn’t define it) they don’t have to bother reading your Miranda rights to you (you know, that whole “you have a right to an attorney” spiel we always see on cop shows that let us know someone is seriously arrested).
All they have to do is interview in a different space, like the front seat of a cop car, and voila, magic suddenly makes your Miranda rights LITERALLY disappear.
The case started in 2014 when a Cleveland Motorist almost hit an Ohio State Police Car. The cop jumped in his narrowly missed car and pulled the defendant over. He then ordered the defendant out of his car and into the front seat of his cop car. Here is where the patrolman began to interrogate the defendant.
Now, I don’t know about you, but common sense will tell you that being ordered into a police car kind of implies you are being detained and cannot leave. The one sole dissenter on the court (that one person who looked Liberty in the eye and said, nah, not gonna light you up today) pretty much said the same thing, which just goes to show you that not everyone who puts on those black robes suddenly gets a case of the derp (but maybe 5 out of 6 do).
This is the point where someone should be repeating those four out of five dentists approve slogans, only in this case, it’s five out of six black robed priests DON’T approve…of your liberty.
During the course of the interrogation, the friendly cop, who was a tad ticked his car almost got swiped by the defendant, got some information out of his target. The defendant admitted he had four mixed drinks at a wedding he had just come from (no, he wasn’t the groom).
The Chief Justice, Maureen O “Miranda, we don’t need no stinkin’ Miranda” Connor wrote that the defendant’s (and by extension, yours) Miranda Rights magically disappeared because he was only asked a few questions and he wasn’t handcuffed, as if handcuffed were the only prerequisite to feeling detained. I’m paraphrasing, but trust me, my paraphrase is far more truthful of the nature of what she said than the bureaucratic doublespeak these black robed priests like to use.
The fact that this cop open carried, the fact that you were ordered to sit in the front seat of a police car, well, none of this would make any reasonable person feel as if they were being detained (except it would, and Mareen O “Miranda, we don’t need no stinkin’ Miranda” Connor knows it).
Once again, as reflected in a story I wrote JUST YESTERDAY, this goes to show you that words written on paper do not have the force to prevent those who claim to be bound by those words (to follow Rule of Law) from finding a way to legitimize the punching in the eye of Liberty because, at the end of the day, the chief job of the court is to protect the legitimacy of state authority, not you.
Click here to read the full ruling.
Contributed by Paul Gordon
