JUSTICE TAKES A BEATING

While Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas labored to justify the
bullying interrogation of a farm worker whom an Oxnard police officer
had just gravely wounded, Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting,
called the inquisition what it was: "the functional equivalent" of
torture. Thomas' 6-3 majority opinion Tuesday rolls back decades of
constitutional protections against self-incrimination and all but
invites the backroom rough-'em-up police tactics of old.

The farm worker, Oliverio Martinez, is blind and partly paralyzed from
the five bullets that police pumped into his body after they stopped
him in connection with an investigation of possible drug sales in his
Oxnard neighborhood. Although Martinez initially complied with orders
to dismount from his bicycle, a scuffle resulted when the officers
discovered he was carrying a knife and Martinez was shot.

Paramedics arrived and carted away Martinez, bleeding and screaming,
to a hospital. For nearly an hour, as Martinez waited for medical
treatment and then as doctors tended him, the officers pressured him
to confess to starting the fight.

"I am dying!" Martinez cried.

"OK, yes, you are dying," the officer said. "But tell me why you are
fighting with the police."

Not once did the police officers inform Martinez of his right to
remain silent and to have a lawyer present. Instead, to try to badger
him into a confession, they took advantage of his physical agony and
mental anguish and the fact that he couldn't move from the hospital
bed.

In the end, the officers got nothing useful from Martinez and never
charged him with a crime. Martinez sued, both for the shooting and for
civil damages on the ground that police violated his 5th Amendment
right against self-incrimination and his due process rights against
egregious police conduct. The shooting lawsuit still stands.

Writing for a splintered majority, Thomas insisted that where there
was no harm of any legal consequence, there was no foul. "Martinez was
never made to be a 'witness' against himself in violation of the 5th
Amendment's self-incrimination clause because his statements were
never admitted as testimony against him in a criminal case [T]he mere
use of compulsive questioning, without more, [does not] violate the
Constitution." Such a narrow thread of reasoning cuts a wide path to
cruelty.

Because Martinez had not been advised of his rights, the court said,
had police charged him based on his nearly incoherent statements, his
disclosures would not have been admissible as evidence anyway.

Three cases before the court next term could push at the boundaries of
permissible evidence in criminal cases. The Martinez case turns back
the clock, and the coming cases could multiply the harm to a civilized
justice system.