A trick I’ve seen in several police detective TV shows. A murder has occurred. The detective has a suspect. The detective gets a warrant and searches the suspect’s car. The detective “finds” the victim’s cufflink in the boot/trunk, which he shows to the suspect. Faced with the evidence, the suspect makes a full confession. In the last scene of the show, the detective reveals to his colleagues that he had brought the cufflink with him, and faked finding it.
So, planting evidence as a trick to get a confession, is that legal? Not actually trying to claim at trial that the cufflink had been found. Just using the confession. Would such a trick get the case thrown out of court, or would it be accepted as legitimate?
I suppose the answer might be different between 1960’s L.A. and 1990’s London. You can answer for any specific time or place you like.
Seems like the same kind of thing. So the cufflink trick wouldn’t work in NJ. These exceptions are built on precedent for actual cases, and the validity of the evidence can still be argued out again. Or maybe it’s already specific to video and the confession based on the cufflink would already be allowed.
I suppose if the suspect agrees to a plea deal because of it this might work.
But if he doesn’t, I can see a problem. If the confession is introduced in court, then surely the presence of the cufflink will come up. At the very least, there’s a possibility that it will. At that point, they will be using planted evidence in a trial, which I’m certain can’t be legal.
I should hope that the confession would be tossed as being the poisoned fruit
of the poisoned tree . . .
IF defendant could demonstrate that that’s what happened.
Good luck with that.
(ETA: If the prosecution openly acknowledges in court that they planted fake evidence to extract a confessions, then I would really hope the confession would be tossed out. That sounds like it’s squarely in the territory that Loach describes in the above quote.)
yes its possible they have to explain the cufflink at trial.
Eg it was on their cars cam recording , or they did it during the formal interview…
Yeah I guess the idea is that someone may give a false confession because they felt they were being framed by police and the situation was hopeless, they may suffer headaches or hypoxia when stressed and become irrational…
The police would be better to recognise that they are only asking for critical information and the circumstantials discussed in an interview are pretty much irrelevant…
they should stick to the crime and not go on fishing expeditions with a suspect in a high pressure situation.
Sure, but imagine you use the fake cufflink to bluff the guy – well, this proves the body was in the trunk of your car, so you’ll clearly be found guilty regardless; we’ll go easy on you, drop the charges from first-degree to second if you cooperate by telling us where you hid it, so the family gets closure and the victim gets a decent burial – and he says, yeah, okay; the body is twenty paces north of the tallest tree in the yard at the end of my cul-de-sac, six feet down.
Or whatever. Point is, the only guy on the planet who could tell you where to dig thusly directs you to the body – which has evidence under its fingernails, plus you can dig out a bullet that matches the killer’s gun, and so on, and so on. And at trial, you mention that, yeah, there never was a cufflink, but the confession wasn’t false and doesn’t even need to be admissible, k thx bye.
If you’re being questioned about a MURDER and you’re talking to the police without your lawyer present (who certainly isn’t going to allow you to confess), then you’re a moron and you get what you deserve.
The suspect will have to have been read his rights before the questioning begins. If the cufflink trick happens after the suspect has waived his right to counsel, then it’s probably just to bad, but if he either has not been read his rights, or if the cufflink is produced after he has requested counsel-- that thing where the police continue to have a conversation in front of the suspect, and are not technically questioning him, but say something that provokes an outburst, and then they say “Whoa, are you revoking your right to counsel?” yeah, that probably wouldn’t be allowed.
I kinda get annoyed with how often TV uses that, especially with suspects who have been arrested before.
Any police investigatory procedure should be based on the idea that its outcome should differentiate between a guilty person and an innocent one. So no bluff about supposed evidence should be so convincing that it would make an innocent person feel that he is being framed. The bluff should only be convincing enough to shake the confidence of a guilty person.
Probably because without the prop, it’s easier to come to the conclusion that it’s either a bluff or a mistake. With a video in hand, the suspect is more likely to think there is doctored evidence; if the suspect is innocent, you don’t want a false confession, but even if the suspect is guilty, you don’t want a confession based on a videotape that the cop then may be expected to produce in court.
If there is no tape in hand, but the suspect confesses based on the mention that one exists, that shows guilty knowledge; an innocent suspect should just be confused by the idea that a tape could exist, or be immediately prepared to deny it.
Sometimes when it happens that there is a very good case against an innocent person, the person may take a plea. You don’t want a person’s mind going in that direction based on a lie-- and since a lot of people who get hauled in are “the usual suspects,” they actually are innocent, in an investigation with few leads. In real life, cases get solved that way, though. My point is, people who already have records may be thinking about the best outcome, even it’s a plea bargain, not about taking their claim of innocence to the highest court.
A favorite of mine is Rhode Island v. Innis, 446 U.S. 291, 297 (U.S. 1980). Police had arrested the suspect, who had invoked his Miranda rights and wasn’t speaking. Officers started driving the suspect to the police station. En route, the officers in the front seat started talking among themselves about the search for the murder weapon (a shotgun), which they believed had been abandoned nearby. The officers talked about how terrible it would be if a child found the shotgun (there was a school nearby) and got injured. Overhearing this, the suspect spoke up, telling the police that he would lead them to the shotgun.
The Supreme Court let it stand, saying that although the suspect was in “custody”, there was no “interrogation”, since the officers weren’t asking him questions designed to elicit an incriminating response. It’s important here that the remarks were brief and offhand; a lengthy conversation about “some kid’s gonna get killed if this guy doesn’t lead us to the gun” probably would have a different result.
Yes, it’s one thing to have to defend yourself against charges for something that you know you didn’t do. It’s another thing to defend against those charges when you know, or strongly suspect, that the government wants you in prison so badly that they are fabricating evidence to do so.
If you do a bit of reading, it turns out that many of the “horror stories” involving allegedly coerced guilty pleas are related to sexual offenses - the government offers a nice dangly carrot of a few months in jail and ten years probation. The suspect figures, hey, I’m not even a criminal (at least, in any serious way), so I shouldn’t have much trouble doing a little probation. I’ll be the model, well behaved probationer that will be an example to others. So they take it, and immediately fail their probation for not admitting in court ordered therapy that they actually committed the crime, are sexually out of control, and desperately need help.
Recently the NYTimes printed a story about the case of a 15-year-old held in Rikers for 3 years before charges were tossed. He and a friend were identified by someone as having mugged the guy. The “victim’s” story kept changing, eventually he disappeared. meanwhile, prosecutors kept stalling the case, until when they dropped it after 3 years none of them accepted any blame for the case dragging that long with no evidence.
The thing was, all the inmates around this guy kept telling him he was crazy to sit in jail insisting he was innocent when all he had to do was take a plea he was offered and get probation (juvenile, no record). That’s the attitude of the general prison population - no point fighting the small stuff, just take what you’re given because you have no choice. it’s not about innocent, guilty, or even evidence. Once the prosecutor’s jaws close on you, like a fire ant, they don’t let go.
TV & movies get so much wrong, its not even funny.
Does it really matter if the TV show is based on real life?
Try working in IT and see how people have expectations of real laptops & PC performing the tasks those devices can do on the flicker box, you might as well thing of Game of Thrones based on real life events.