A federal judge decided to read 19-year-old Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights even though the FBI hated the idea, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The FBI knew Judge Marianne Bowler was planning on reading the Miranda rights but "was not happy about it," House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers said in a hearing Wednesday.
"They believed they needed more time. This is not a good way to stop another bomb from going off," Rogers said, according to the Journal.
Investigators had invoked a public safety exception to put off reading Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, including telling him that he had a right to remain silent. Usually, prosecutors can't use statements made without a Miranda warning against a suspect in court. This exception lets investigators continue questioning a suspect and later use that information against the person in a court of law.
The idea behind the exception is that investigators feel free to question suspects about imminent risks to the public. Tsarnaev stopped speaking as soon as his rights were read to him.
Rogers, who's an ex-FBI agent, said investigators needed more time to ask Tsarnaev questions about whether there where more more bombs hidden somewhere.
Meanwhile, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said on MSNBC that the government made a huge mistake by waiting so long to question the suspect, according to HuffPost.
"There was never a basis for the public safety exception," Dershowitz said. "As you know, when they announced it, the police had already announced that the public safety danger was over, they had arrested everybody."
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