But let’s take a hypothetical. Under your principle, if someone committed a murder, then went to a bar where an undercover police officer happened to be sitting, and that person admitted committing the murder, then the confession would be inadmissible for “ignorance.”

If you think that should be the right result, I would like to hear why. If you think that should be the wrong result, then how would you square it with your principle?

As an aside, you don’t seem to be a lawyer, but you have adopted the worst conventions of lawyerly drafting. No one uses shall anymore, and even fewer understand the distinction between shall and will (the short version: only use shall when imposing an obligation on the second person subject of the sentence, otherwise you create ambiguity).

Finally, your base supposition is simply wrong. I have sat in courtrooms and helped pick and watched juries. They are the most unfriendly people in the courtroom to the defendant most of the time. I can guarantee you that if we had the system you want, where jurors determined admissibility and relevance of evidence, the acquittal rate would go down to almost zero. District attorneys would stop making deals because they would know they virtually could not lose at trial. It is hard to get judges to disallow evidence, but judges will exclude evidence if you can show them why it should be legally excluded.

Trying to do that with the jury invariably taints the jury (you cannot un-hear evidence on which you are ruling), and I assure you that the jury will exclude almost no evidence. They get mad now when they find out later that evidence was excluded, saying that if only they had know that, the verdict would have been different (usually guilty).

There are sound reason why the finder of fact and the finder of law are not the same, and unless your theory accounts for those reasons, you’re just blowing smoke.

IMHO, Miranda is a narrow application of a principle that needs to be applied more widely: a person shall not be deemed to have waived his rights except through voluntary action. Actions resulting from ignorance, government deception, or perceived government intimidation, shall not be presumed to be voluntary. If juries were invited to examine whether apparent waivers were really voluntary, and were instructed to discount evidence obtained in violation of rights that were not voluntarily waived, I suspect the relationship between the government and the citizenry would be greatly improved.

oh really ….WTF??????

More yacht forfeitures! More pretty rich white girls prosecuted! It’s the price of freedom, people!

Oh, so when it’s happening to Joe Shmoe on the street, no biggie – when it’s on a yacht it gets their attention. Glad that’s clear.

Funny, I don’t recall seeing any definition of law in that way before. No wonder federal prosecutors make a career of lying.

Miranda is a (misguided) attempt to fix that error through the Fifth Amendment. In fact, I don’t believe that the Sixth Amendment is referred to at all in the majority opinion in Miranda, but I would have to go back and read it again to be sure (I know the dissent refers to the Sixth Amendment). See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966).

(and yes, it’s spelled “defence” since the Constitution was written before Webster ruined American spelling)

I don’t support Miranda warnings either, but that’s because Miranda is the biggest exercise in judicial bullshitting in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court (and that’s saying something). They made up a Fifth Amendment right to counsel to avoid trying to fix the disastrous clusterfuck the Court created in delineating the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and doing their best to ignore the real inquiry under the Fifth Amendment: whether the suspect had been coerced.

See also: Barr, Bob, etc.

“Scalia and Thomas are vanguards of an understanding by the modern right that its distrust of government extends all the way to the criminal justice system,” said Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University.

I think that’s a bit of wishful thinking. I think he’s absolutely correct about thomas (i’ve mentioned before he’s my personal fav justice) not so much about scalia. Scalia still has the idea in his head that the feds have nothing but good intent in their hearts.

I am sure Meese is quite pleased to be giving the telescreen report on how free we are in Airstrip One.