A federal judge made the call to advise the Boston bombing suspect of his Miranda rights, even though investigators apparently still wanted to question him further under a public-safety exception.
The move came as authorities in New York said Thursday that the two suspects had "spontaneously" decided to travel to Manhattan last week to detonate the remainder of their explosives in Times Square. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the information came from authorities in Boston who had been questioning the suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
The judge's action, which was made Monday, prompted lawmakers to press the Justice Department as to why it didn't make a stronger bid to resist the judge's plans.
Investigators are invoking the "public safety exception" in their questioning of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev before advising him of his rights. Will using it now make things more difficult for prosecutors later? WSJ's Jason Bellini has "The Short Answer." Image: Associated Press/ Bob Leonard
A Justice Department official said no one at the department asked Magistrate Judge Marianne Bowler to come to the hospital, where 19-year-old Mr. Tsarnaev was recovering, and that she made the determination on her own, following standard court-room practice.
Federal rules of criminal procedure require that defendants appear before a judge without unnecessary delay—usually defined as within one business day.
Judge Bowler convened a brief, makeshift court hearing in the hospital room about 16 hours after a sealed criminal complaint was filed in her court against Mr. Tsarnaev. Her reading of the Miranda warning came as part of the formal presentation of charges to the suspect, an act that would have in normal circumstances taken place in a courtroom.
Judge Bowler was the first government official to advise Mr. Tsarnaev of his right to remain silent after his capture Friday night, officials briefed on the matter say. Mr. Tsarnaev after being read his rights stopped talking to investigators, the officials added.
The public-safety exception allows investigators to question suspects for an unspecified period of time without giving them a Miranda warning, the formal language advising suspects of their right to remain silent, among other things. The exception is designed to give law-enforcement officials time to determine if there are other threats to public safety.
It will ultimately be up to a court to decide how much, if any, of the statements given before a Miranda warning can be admissible evidence for prosecution.
The judge first told the Justice Department on Saturday she intended to read Mr. Tsarnaev his rights on Monday. One U.S. official said the judge cited the intense television coverage of the capture as one reason for initiating the criminal prosecution.
The weekend legal treatment of Mr. Tsarnaev will revive a debate over how terrorist suspects should be interrogated, a charged topic that goes to the heart of questions about how such suspects should be treated, especially when they are American.
Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian who tried to blow up a plane landing in Detroit in 2009, was read his Miranda rights, setting off a political furor. He initially stopped cooperating with investigators but later resumed.
House intelligence committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) said in an interview Thursday that Justice officials should have pushed back on the judge's plans. He wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder late Wednesday to register his concerns.
"What I find shocking is that the judiciary proactively inserted itself into this circumstance and the Justice Department so readily acquiesced to the circumstance," he said. "The court doing this proactively they may have jeopardized our ability to get public-safety information."
Mr. Rogers, a former FBI agent, said because of the severity of the threat and the suspect's poor health, investigators didn't have sufficient time to question him. Among the information investigators were still seeking was whether others were involved in the attacks and whether there were additional explosives hidden somewhere, he said.
The FBI was aware Judge Bowler was planning to go to the hospital Monday and was "not happy about it," Mr. Rogers said. "They believed they needed more time. This is not a good way to stop another bomb from going off."
An FBI spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The judge, through a court clerk, also declined to comment.
The revelation came late Wednesday at a briefing before the House intelligence committee. One lawmaker in the meeting asked FBI Deputy Director Sean Joyce why the FBI didn't raise objections, according to another U.S. official.
Mr. Joyce said in essence it wasn't the FBI's role to object to such a determination, the official recounted.
The answer stunned many of the lawmakers in the room. "The whole tenor in the room changed," the official said.
Meanwhile, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had previously said Mr. Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan, 26, had intended to come to New York to "party." On Thursday, Mr. Kelly said the younger Mr. Tsarnaev revealed under subsequent questioning that the men intended to come to detonate some or all of the six devices that they had in their possession.
Mr. Kelly said the suspects "decided spontaneously" to head to New York while riding in a Mercedes sport-utility vehicle last Thursday, a vehicle they allegedly acquired in a carjacking in Cambridge, Mass. The plan was interrupted when the carjacking victim escaped and called police, Mr. Kelly said. Tamerlan was killed in a shoot-out with police early Friday morning.
—Tamer El-Ghobashy contributed to this article. Write to Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com and Devlin Barrett at devlin.barrett@wsj.com
