Over the weekend I posted a quick little note suggesting that we are going to be deluged with pieces by Very Serious People telling us that we should feel sorry for the Tsarnaevs. They had a rough life. They came from a broken home. They came from a broken nation. You get the idea. I must admit to being surprised at how fast it happened, however.
For starters, there were all the amateur constitutional lawyers on Twitter and in the blogosphere and on Facebook telling us that Joker Tsarnaev not receiving a Miranda Warning is The Worst Abuse of the Constitution Ever and that we were abandoning our ideals by refusing to read him his rights. These people are, of course, entirely ignorant of what a Miranda Warning entails. They appear to think it's some sort of magical incantation, a spell out of a Harry Potter novel (Mirandum Warnemus!) that must be chanted in order for an arrest to turn into a conviction.
I'll let Orin Kerr at Volokh do the heavy constitutional lifting. But the short version of this: Even if you never ever ever Mirandize a suspect you're questioning, all it means is that the stuff they say during an interrogation cannot be admitted during a trial. And guess what! There is more than enough evidence to convict Joker without ever once putting him on the stand.
There is likely hours of videotape placing him and his brother at the scene. There is video and photo of him placing the backpacks that contained the bombs. There is an eyewitness who—right before those sick animals blew off his legs—saw the guys planting the bombs. There is a carjacking victim who was told by the brothers that they were the bombers. There are the police who engaged in a shootout with the pair during which they lobbed explosives at the cops. You could convict Joker Tsarnaev ten times out of ten without needing to admit into evidence anything he said during the interrogation. Spare me the nonsense about how we're shredding the Constitution and denying this poor baby his rights until you know what our constitutional protections actually entail, mmkay?
Meanwhile, there's a cohort of people on the Internet who think that Joker isn't guilty at all. Tweeting under the hashtag flag of #freejahar, these misguided souls thinks somebody has set up Joker the bomb. He couldn't have done it! He's such a good kid! Like his aunt and his father said, it was likely a set up. By the Russians? The FBI? Who knows? I really wish Dave Weigel had been right when he wrote that it was unlikely the Boston Marathon Bombing would lead to conspiracy theories. But rational thought rarely stands a chance against The Idiocracy.
The blogs, of course, are filled with Very Serious People who tell us that we should never be sad in the event that someone gets hurt, or something. "I will not celebrate the fate of the Tsarnaev brothers. I am not happy that one lays dead and the other in serious condition in the hospital. I’d be happier if Tamerlan was returning from a day training in the ring to see his wife and daughter. I’d be happier if Dzhokhar was wrapping up a class in marine biology and planning his Friday night plans with his college roommates." And I'd be happy if life were a series of non-sequiturs as well, I guess. But I'm happier still that with the reality in which we live, where one of these monsters is dead because his brother ran him over with a SUV and then dragged his body around in an attempt to flee the police while the other appears to have shot his throat out in a botched suicide attempt. Couldn't have happened to a nicer pair of dudes. Frankly, I hope it hurt and I fear that it didn't hurt nearly enough.
We can always count on the artistes to inject some sense into the proceedings, right? Cue Amanda Palmer, who wrote a very thoughtful poem about Joker Tsarnaev that, among other things, asks us to consider how bored he must have been as he lay in that boat bleeding out. His iPhone battery was almost certainly dead! And his brother is dead!
So sad. It's all so very very sad.