The Unlikely Meeting Between Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Benjamin Quarles

Part I explores the Marathon Bombing in more detail alongside the government’s reliance on Quarles to interrogate Tsarnaev. Part II then seeks to place the Tsarnaev interrogation in the context of modern judicial constructions of the public safety exception. Doing so firmly illustrates that the government’s position was unsupported by judicial precedent. By focusing on the Quarles decision itself, Part III then seeks to provide a proper historic context for the government’s decision not to read Tsarnaev his Miranda warnings.

In particular, Part III considers the Justices’ private papers from Quarles to demonstrate that the Court never considered anything beyond applying the public safety exception to concern about a missing weapon at the time of Benjamin Quarles’s arrest. Part III therefore contends that applying Quarles to intricate questions of national security is both careless and constitutionally questionable. This Article concludes that Quarles should overtake Miranda, or the modern Court should reexamine Quarles.