Latest Brain Twister From the US Supreme Court

[Bob Schroeck]

The braintwisty thing is that being silent doesn't mean you've invoked your right to silence. Actually using the right doesn't legally confer upon you the use of the right in a court of law -- you have to explicitly say out loud that you're going to use your right to silence. I know I'm not the only one who sees an untenable paradox in that requirement -- Justice Sotomayor said as much in the dissenting opinion, noting that the decision

..."turns Miranda upside down."

"Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent - which counterintuitively requires them to speak," she said. "At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded."

-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.