Too messy (& time consuming).
The main idea of a garbage bag to begin with is to keep the guy from dripping all over the place as you’re disposing of the body. (If it also keeps the body from being discovered for a bit longer, then that’s another big plus.)
If the guy doesn’t fit in one bag you put one bag over one end and one over the other, and tie or tape in the middle.
Whatever. The general idea is more important than the details here.
Not quite. “An intruder has been shot”. Not “I shot an intruder”.
And the answer to “did you shoot him?” is “I need to speak to an attorney before I answer any questions” if asked by a police officer. If it is asked by the 911 operator, the answer is “Get the police and an ambulance to my address ASAP”.
The police are entitled to know [ul][li]Your true name []Your current address []Your correct date of birth.[/ul]The answer to any other question, no matter what, is “I need to speak to an attorney.” [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
OK, but assuming this malcontent had broken into my house, rather than just skulking around the outside (a point on which your OP is unclear, as others have noted already), and I shot him with my hypothetical gun, resulting in his death, the chances are extremely remote that I’ll be in trouble with the law. Way more remote than a 5% chance of solving a murder where there’s no apparent connection between murderer and victim.
I’m guesstimating on the 5%, but whatever it is, I don’t want to take that big a chance on spending the best remaining years of my life in a prison cell.
In the alternative where you call 911 right away, and call a lawyer next, do you really think that there’s a bigger chance that the cops or the D.A. will decide to charge you with the murder, and if they do, that it will hold up in court?
So you’re basically telling the cops that there may be another person who just shot someone in your house out wandering, perhaps armed? That doesn’t seem like a particularly effective strategy.
I was thinking of a guy in your house. (Hard to think of a reason you should shoot anyone outside your house.)
Based on the rest of your post, you seem to be defining “in trouble with the law” as “convicted of murder”. The average middle class person’s life would be ruined by being prosecuted for this crime, even if eventually found innocent, and even being investigated would be extremely unpleasant.
Plus, as I’ve noted earlier, there’s also a chance that you get sued by the relatives. Or that you have revenge taken against you or your family by his buddies.
I would think it’s lower than 5%, and also that even if you get caught, you have a decent chance of beating the rap (though a lot lower than if you had reported it).
Not to mention, there are a lot of logistical problems with going the disposal-of-body route.
First, someone might’ve heard the shot, and called 911 already. If the cops are checking out your street (and presumably knocking on your door) while you’re pulling together trash bags and duct tape, it’s going to make it hard to get your show on the road. The cops might even see where somebody apparently forced their way into your house, and now you’re in trouble.
But suppose nobody calls the cops. You’ve still got to get a (just to give a number) 180-lb. dead body to your car without getting bodily fluids all over the place. Hope your trash bags are extra heavy duty, and your duct tape is as sticky as sticky can be. Because those bags are going to want to come apart, and/or snag on stuff and rip.
Unless you’ve got a garage with a door that opens into the house, you’ll have to drag this load out your door, and through your yard to your car. Even in the middle of the night, you might be seen by your insomniac neighbor. You really don’t want to be seen dragging that load through your yard, and trying to wrestle it into your car trunk, in the middle of the night. Someone might think you’ve got something to hide.
So assume you’ve got the garage. You’re going to have to dump the body somewhere, and you’re going to have to drive almost all the way to your wooded dumping ground, due to the difficulty of dragging the 180-lb. body. Maybe you’ll leave tire tracks. How the hell do you know whether you’ll leave tire tracks that the police can use? What percentage of people know shit about this? Assuming you’re in the vast majority of the population that doesn’t have a clue about this, maybe you’d better play it safe. Because when I go to my tire place, they know what tires I’ve previously bought from them; it’s on their computers. If the police find the track of an identifiable kind of tire, they can ask the tire places in the area who they’ve sold that kind of tire to in the past several years. Can they track me down like this? Maybe, maybe not. I’m sure not going to bet 20-to-life on it.
I’m sure I could think of more problems, but that’ll do for starters.
I should also note that this business of telling the cops you refuse to speak to them without a lawyer has a downside as well.
While it will definitely decrease the likelihood that you are found guilty if your’re charged, it will also most likely increase the likelihood that you get prosecuted. Because you will look suspicious.
The nature of people’s minds is that people can make an initial assumption and then tailor their interpretation of all subsequent evidence in accordance with their initial assumption. So first impressions can count for a lot.
I’m not saying that in aggregate it’s better to talk without a lawyer. Just that there’s a downside in refusing to do so.
I agree. That’s why I noted this in the OP.
[I would also note that relying on the silence of family members is also risky. Because even if your relationship with them is good now, these things can change over the years. You never know.]
Oh yeah? How do you know the intruder was shot? Are you an ER doctor? A firearms expert? Better stick with “There’s a person I don’t know in my house, lying on the floor and bleeding.”
Because the point is to avoid saying anything that might incriminate you.
As Bricker taught me in one of the Zimmerman threads, the elements of manslaughter are [ul][li]Who dunnit []Where he dunnit, and []did he dunnit with reckless disregard for human life[/ul]That he was shot does nothing to establish any of the above. Saying “I shot him” does. [/li]
I doubt this very much. Zimmerman (for example) fell all over himself talking to the police, and he still got charged.
I think the police would assume you were guilty or innocent depending on the circumstances, not whether you talk or not. I am sure they would love you to talk your head off - it makes their job much easier if you can blab your way to a conviction. The trouble is, even if you are 100% innocent, the more you talk, the more likely it is that you will contradict yourself in some way, or come up with new details (which may or may not be true) that make you look guilty. Even if you are not. And the police are going to lie to you to see how you react.
It is really, really difficult to look innocent under interrogation even if you are innocent. Much better to talk to a lawyer, figure out a good strategy to minimize your trouble, tell your story once and then ask if you are free to go. If they say Yes, never talk to the police again. If they say No, never talk to the police again.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the point of refusing to speak is that you’re not speaking in the moment, while experiencing an adrenaline crash, without a lawyer present to keep you from shoving your size 13 in your mouth. You’re not planning to clam up and never speak a word about the circumstances to the police, ever, you just do the speaking on your terms.
I also don’t think that saying “I shot the man” is particularly incriminating, unless you intend to assert that you did NOT fire the gun, at which point a jury is REALLY going to wonder how you wound up in the room alone with the bleeding burglar, with the gun on the kitchen table, gunpowder residue on your hands, while calling in the shooting to 911.
Any number of individual examples mean nothing. I’m (obviously, I would think) not trying to claim that everyone who talks to the police won’t get charged or that everyone who doesn’t will. Just that you’re changing the odds. [Zimmerman is a particularly bad example in any event, because he eventually did convince the police that he was saying the truth, and would not have been charged absent outside political pressure.]
If the police were robots or computers, maybe. But they’re people. They tend to think of themselves as being less threatening and dangerous to an innocent person than they actually are. It follows from this that they are apt to interpret your refusal to talk to them as stemming from having something to hide.
[It’s a bit incongruous that people are so sanguine about calling the police to begin with but so wary of talking to them. For the same reason that there’s a risk in talking to them, there’s also a risk in calling them to begin with. They can get it wrong.]
To an average person, that’s very true. To an experienced interrogator, who has interrogated a lot of innocent and a lot of guilty people, that’s still true, but to a much lesser extent.
But of course, they can still get it wrong. And if they do, you’re in for a lot of trouble. See above.
The district attorney decides whether or not to press charges, AIUI. And he or she is supposed to press charges only when there is enough evidence for a grand jury. I don’t think my refusal to provide a statement until I talk to a lawyer is going to affect that decision except to make it less likely. If I don’t talk, there is one source of evidence against me that dries up.
If my statement is the only source of evidence against me, then I won’t be charged because I didn’t make any statement (until after consulting with, and only on the advice of, a lawyer). If there is other evidence, then I will be charged on that basis. So AFAICT asking for a lawyer makes it less likely, not more, that you will be charged.
Maybe they think that. Legally, they cannot use my request to speak with an attorney before being questioned as the basis for deciding whether or not to bring charges.
I don’t care what they think. I just want out of the situation with the least chance of being wrongly charged. If it helps, I might add something like “I have no experience with this kind of thing, so I need to consult with a lawyer who does. Sorry, but that’s how it’s gotta be.”
I don’t see that. If I do anything except call the police, like trying to conceal the fact of the shooting or hide evidence or whatever, that is a crime in and of itself. I don’t want to be convicted of anything, manslaughter or filing a false report or interfering with the legal process or anything else.
No thanks. We give the absolute minimum, and we don’t break the law. If they want to charge me with something, they have to come up with all the evidence themselves - I’m not going to help.
I don’t think the police are any less prone to assume guilt than anyone else.
Regards,
Shodan
They’re going to want to know why you need the police and an ambulance. Providing literally no other information will either get nobody to your home or quite possibly get you shot by police, since, as you have not told them what the hell is going on, they might see a dead body on the ground, or having heard shots, send a SWAT team crashing in.
The DA will be heavily influenced by the police interpretation of the evidence.
There is already evidence against you. You just killed someone, for one thing. Whether this was legitimate self defense or not is what’s in question. It’s not like you might have had nothing to do with it.
They can’t use it in and of itself. But it if it colors their interpretation of other evidence about the situation, they can use that other evidence.
I didn’t say they are. I said they’re less likely to interpret the interrogation-driven inconsistencies and new details that you referred to as evidence of guilt, as compared to someone who is not as familiar with these interrogations and the types of responses that people make in them.
What this means is that if they decide you’re guilty and the DA harps on these inconstencies in court, you’re fighting uphill to convince a lay jury that they’re innocuous. But it means that if the police are not predisposed to think you’re guilty, they are less likely to charge you with a crime on this basis, since they’re comparing you to other people they’ve interrogated, not to some abstract notion of how a person would react in that situation.
Couple things:
If I shoot someone in self-defense, and I believe it was a “good shoot,” then I would certainly tell the police I was the shooter. I mean, think about it… if the police come to my door, and no one admits to being the shooter, then (for all they know) the dead person could be an innocent victim of murder. In which case they’re going to arrest the person they believe was the shooter.
If it was a good shoot, I will say, “I was fearful for my life, I shot the Bad Guy in an effort to immediately stop him, and I want to talk to my attorney.”
Secondly, I stand by my assertion that you should use the word “stop,” and not “kill.” Reason being… even if it was a good shoot, there’s still a decent chance I will be criminally prosecuted or sued in civil court. I can hear the prosecutor now: “So, Crafter_Man, you stated your intent was to kill Mr. Johnson. Is that correct? You wanted to kill him, and not merely stop him?” Far fetched? I don’t know. But why take the chance? Instead my story (which is the truth) will be that I wanted to stop him as quickly as possible, and I used the most effective tool at my disposal to do so.
I’m dismayed that no one else seems to share my “eat him” strategy. You don’t have to do it yourself, you could get a dog to do it.
S/he already killed a person. S/he already got her/imself in an extremely unpleasant mess. Whatever unpleasantness comes from being investigated regarding whether s/he maybe did anything wrong is still nothing compared with the really extreme unpleasantness of being prosecuted for actual, deliberate obstruction of justice.
You acted the way you thought right, and it cost someone their life? Then deal with the hassle. It’s not supposed to be a casual thing.
That may be appropriate on a societal level, but from the perspective of the individual, it’s logical and appropriate to try to minimize their own hassle (if you insist on that term) to the extent possible.
Minimizing my own hassle would involve not committing a felony in covering up the killing, not disposing of the corpse myself in secret, and not spending the rest of my life wondering if the killing will ever be linked back to me.
I’m a single woman living alone. I don’t have a criminal record. If I kill an intruder, I’m almost certainly going to come out looking like a hero…as long as I don’t do anything stupid.