Let’s say I, the average American with no criminal record, found a suitcase. Being a good (and perhaps slightly dumb) person, I grab the suitcase and look inside to see if I can find any personal information to help me locate the owner. Unfortunately, it turns out to have cocaine/illegal firearms/raw plutonium/whatever in it. Rather than drop it and leave it, since now my prints are all over it, or perhaps because I sense danger and am worried whoever the suitcase was intended for will arrive and take it before the authorities have a chance to get there and investigate it on scene (again, perhaps hypothetical me is a bit dense), I flag down the nearest patrol officer, or go to the police station down the street, or bring it home and call an officer to my house, and explain the situation and turn it in.
Can they detain me or charge me? I know they could probably get a warrant to make sure I’m not just turning stuff in to throw off suspicion from myself (like how some people purportedly report murders of people they offed to throw off heat), but is there anything that could give them the ability to charge me with possession for carrying the suitcase to the station/holding it until they picked it up? I’m not asking if they WOULD, since they probably know better than to detain good citizens and thus deter people from doing good deeds, I’m just asking if there’s any law (in the US, pick the state, city, or locale of your choice) prohibiting them from throwing the cuffs on me and charging me with possession on the spot for “being in possession” of the suitcase I just willingly gave them.
Arrested? Of course. Frankly, I hope they would. I’m positive that the police would bring you in for questioning. However, I strongly doubt that you’d actually be charged with anything. Having actually reported the contraband in question, I think you’d probably be in the clear once you’d told what you know.
This is silly. If this willing gentlemen (or woman, as the case may be), having already called the police’s attention in some manner to this large stash of contraband, might be willing to go and answer their questions on his own free will? I mean, people are free to talk to the police, ACLU and their youtube videos notwithstanding. And I can’t see why the police wouldn’t first ask if you’d like to come down to the station to answer some more questions. Seems OP would have no problem complying with that request, negating the need for an arrest.
I remember an episodes of Cops (an American TV show where a camera crew follows police officers on patrol) where a man flagged down a patrol car and said that he wanted to turn in his neighbor for being a drug dealer. The man said he had proof and handed over some drugs that he claimed he got from his neighbor. The officers cuffed the man who gave them the drugs and arrested him. In the after-arrest scene a cop muttered something to the camera about how stupid people are. There was nothing shown on the show about their taking any action against the accused drug dealer.
My non-lawyer guess is that the only hope you have is proving with your fingerprints that you touched the outside of the suitcase, but not the inside of the contraband itself (maybe the outside of the plastic bags it’s wrapped in, but not the inside of the bag).
Which is slim evidence.
So the cops or the state attorneys looking for an easy conviction have a good case that you’re not really an innocent citizen doing his duty, but a criminal trying a ploy, for example trying to damage the competition.
Are we talking about the US police here? Have you read any articles on how wide a leeway the US police has, how badly educated many of them are, how corrupt many of them turn out to be, and how many like bullying and see all people as criminals until proven otherwise?
I wouldn’t trust US cops with my innocence under normal circumstances.
Given that there are laws that allow them to seize anything you own - your car, your house, your money - if they suspect it’s connected to any crime, how could a law exist that protects you from being charged if you actually possess something criminal?
Possibly because the drug dealer was taken down later by a different patrol that didn’t have a camera crew on hand?
I mean, I don’t watch Cops and have no personal knowledge of the story at hand, but from the above description it seems that the subject is more or less confessing to the act of purchasing drugs, which is an altogether different legal animal from finding an abandoned parcel of drugs as the OP is suggesting.
I think we’re talking about a situation where the citizen approached the police and voluntarily handed over the contraband, right? [As opposed to someone who was busted by the cops and is now claiming he was on his way to turn in the contraband]
And I don’t think that would actually be an easy conviction. Sure, there’s no argument about the basic fact of the citizen being in possession of the contraband, but at some point he’s going to be able to explain himself to a judge, and the judge will be asking some pointed questions to the DA, along the lines of “Are you serious? You’re really trying to lock someone up for voluntarily turning in contraband to the authorities?”.
Now, if the DA has some evidence things aren’t exactly as the citizen claims (e.g. he’s a convicted drug dealer and police were about to execute a warrant to search his house for drugs, or something like that), then there might be a real case to be made.
But if things really are as the OP posits (truly innocent citizen who approaches police, not vice versa; no bizarre circumstances that would cast extra suspicion on the citizen), then, while the citizen might be technically in violation of the law, it’s highly unlikely that a DA would charge them, or a judge convict them.
So what happened to the guy in the above-mentioned COPs example? Did he just get off from possession of drugs? The cops didn’t believe him that he bought the drugs as proof that his neighbor was a drug dealer, they thought he was lying.
I thought the US had jury trial, not judge trial? That is, the judge is not supposed to get involved?
And isn’t it also currently that status of the whole law proceedings that even an innocent person going to trial, the outcome can be “proven innocent = free” and “proven guilty = 20 years” (or even death depending on crime) and hence most (80%?) of cases are instead done with the DA suggesting a deal (for 2 years instead of possible 20 years as example) instead, and the accused agreeing because the risk of conviction is too high? (Because the US system has DAs being elected and thus having an interest not in justice, but a spotless record of many convictions?)
So even though most cops believe everybody to be guilty, you assume that most DAs and most judges will believe that accused when he claims “I just found it and turned it in”? Really? The DA will not claim that this is obviously a lie because nobody is that honest/ dumb?
We have both. Criminal cases, as I understand it, are entitled to a jury trial if they want, but if they don’t want it, I think there is a way to have a judge trial. Note that IANAL and IANAJ.
First off, I’m sure the COPS believed his story, it’s just that he admitted to a crime. Just because it’s a slightly lesser crime doesn’t mean they’ll let him go after admitting it.
Secondly, while there are jury trials in America, the judge oversees the whole process and can dismiss the case before it goes to the jury if there isn’t sufficient evidence. Or, at least, that’s what a lifetime of watching Law & Order has taught me.
In the US legal system, you are NEVER “proven innocent.”
Every single person in this country (even the slime bags) is innocent!
IF you are charged, and all the steps are taken to the point where a trial is held, the prosecutor then has the BURDEN of proving to the jury (or the judge, in a bench trial) guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
If the jury decides that the prosecutor has not done his or her job, then the accused is determined to be “not guilty.”
The defendant is under no obligation to “prove innocence.”
The laws for possession all include the phrase knowingly, willfully, or something similar, as far as I know. So if you find a briefcase or something similar, and discover drugs, you are in the clear as you did not willfully take possession of the drugs. If you take the briefcase and move it somewhere after you know there are drugs, then that is different. Once you know there are drugs and you take possession, even if that possession is intended to be temporary, you are in violation of the statutes.
Also, take note of the fact that a finding of “not guilty” is not the same as being “innocent”.
A ruling of “not guilty” is a legal construct; “innocent” is a matter of fact.
I believe that in the British justice system there is a ruling of “not proven”, which means that the person probably did it, but there was not enough evidence to definitively prove it.
Under UK law there are two defences to the crime of simple possession of a controlled substance under S5(4) of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 which deal with this exact scenario. The person in your example would meet all of the criteria for having committed the offence of simple possession of cocaine or plutonium: he is aware that he in physical possession of a controlled substance (even if he opened the briefcase and thought it contained a bag of flour when it was actually cocaine, he would probably still be deemed to be ‘in possession’ of cocaine).
The two defences, however, read as follows:
That defence is designed for the type of scenario where a mother finds drugs in her kid’s room and confiscates them, either to destroy them or hand them to the police. The second defence is more appropriate for your scenario:
The guy in your example is the archetypical situation where a S(4)(b) defence would apply: he would raise the defence in court, and it would then be up to the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he did not simply take possession of it for the purposes of giving it to the police.
As far as your actual question goes - “can they detain me or charge me?” - the answer is yes. They can certainly arrest and detain you if they want, and they could charge you if they want. Then you would go to court and plead not guilty and your lawyer would raise the s(4)(b) defence. However, as you point out, if they believe your story then they obviously aren’t going to detain you, and the prosecutors would obviously decide not to charge you, because they know you’d have a valid defence at trial. They would only decide to detain or charge you if they didn’t believe you.