Edwin Meese Quotes
The idea that the police cannot ask questions of the person that knows most about the crime is an infamous decision.
Meese, Edwin. Interview. U.S. News & World Report, 14 Oct. 1985, p. 25.
This is the classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
By 2005 trust of many Muslims of the U. S. government had reached such a low point that loyal American Muslim organizations were recommending total non-cooperation with the FBI which had rounded up and held many loyal American Muslims while they were searching for fundamentalist terrorists. President George W. Bush made some very important speeches explaining that all Muslims were not responsible and the FBI worked hard to establish relationships with Muslim leaders and organizations. After a few years many of the roundup practices had stopped but there was a residual of mistrust thereafter.
Edwin Meese III is an American attorney, law professor, author and member of the Republican Party who served in official capacities within the Ronald Reagan Gubernatorial Administration (1967–1974), the Reagan presidential transition team (1980–81) and the Reagan White House (1981–1985), eventually rising to hold the position of the 75th United States Attorney General (1985–1988), a position from which he resigned following the Wedtech scandal.
