Prosecutor to witness: Did you witness the crime?
Witness: Yes, I did.
Prosecutor: Why were you at that street corner at 2am?
Witness: I plead the fifth.
Prosecutor (making mental note to self): Hmmm, he must have been doing something illegal. I think I’ll launch an investigation into this witness’s activities.
Would the prosecutor be acting unethically? The witness’s testimony isn’t being used against him per se; any evidence collected in such an investigation would be separate from this particular testimony. Would this be kosher?
The police approach you and ask if you know anything about so and so. You say, “Bugger off, I ain’t talkin’ ta no coppers.” They might be inclined to scrutinize you and see if there’s probable cause for further action, like searching you for drugs and stuff, but there’s not much they can do.
Now if you say, “Sure, he went that away,” but you really have him in a box you’re sitting on and acting as a misdirection, and they find out, then they can charge you with obstruction and accessory charges and the like.
If you say “I don’t know anything” and later they find out you did know something, they probably couldn’t get very far trying to charge you with anything, but might be able to get obstruction charges on you for lying.
But you’re not required to talk to them. You can tell them you have nothing to say, and they can look stern and threaten but they really can’t make you talk.
doubled said:
That’s when you’re going to want your lawyer to get you the broadest immunity agreement he can wangle. But if the agreement covers any and all drug smuggling related events, and then you get asked what you were doing in the back woods taking that pit stop, and you mention you were shooting some illegal aliens in the head, if you didn’t cover that in the immunity agreement that will be grounds for future charges. So if you get asked what were you doing, you’d best still plead the Fifth on that.
Picard Kills Kirk said:
If your testimony isn’t related to your own crimes, then the judge can compel testimony through contempt of court charges. If you have an immunity agreement and then refuse to testify on the merits of the immunity agreement, the DA can file charges on you because the immunity agreement has been invalidated. At the very least, your request for an immunity agreement in order to testify will be grounds for them to investigate you further. It is also possible that the judge can charge you with contempt for not answering under the protection of immunity.
I suspect you’re going to want to fill your lawyer in completely so she will know the full ramifications of what needs to be covered by the immunity agreement and when to object to questioning. “Obtection: irrelevant and unnecessary. It has already been established that the witness was in the woods as part of the drug smuggling operation. There’s no need for badgering whether he needed to take a leak or just felt like a breath of fresh air.”
AFAIK, you don’t ever have to say anything to the police. Even if they arrest you, all you should expect to say would be “I understand my rights. I want a lawyer.” But that just makes it easier on you.
Let me correct myself. You do have to identify yourself, I believe.
The summary is that you shouldn’t talk to the police because talking to police can’t help you and can only hurt you. Anything you say to the police can be used against you later, and, even if you’re innocent, you might say something wrong, might make a mistake, might say something innocent that could be used against you, you might admit you committed another crime, or the police might lie about or misundertand what you told them.
That being said, you should watch the video, and also the second part of the video, with the police officer, because they have some pretty good information for you.
To summarize the second part in which the detective responds to the law professor, he agrees. Don’t talk to cops if you’re a suspect. It won’t end well for you.
The video is discussing situations where you are a suspect or potential suspect. It is not applying to situations where you are requesting assistance (such as reporting a missing child).
The key point is that anything you tell the cop can be used against you, but nothing you tell the cop can be used to aid your defense.
Okay, having an alibi can aid your defense, but saying “I didn’t do it” can’t be used to help you in the same way that saying “I did it” can be used against you.
The video explains that if you are a suspect or being questioned, assert your right for legal council, and do not participate in any conversations with the cops without your lawyer. “Am I free to go?”
It actually goes quite a but farther than that. Don’t ever talk to the police, at all, ever, whether or not you are a suspect. There are probably some circumstances where the potential benefit to talking to cops outweighs the risk, such as your own child child being kidnapped, but this video doesn’t really address that. It’s all about interviews, of suspects or witnesses, related to crimes that have already been committed.
One of the reasons is that there are so many laws, that no one person knows them all, and it’s virtually impossible to know whether you are admitting something which may turn out to be an obscure crime. The example given is that under certain circumstances it is illegal under Fereral statutes to possess a lobster. Apparently the Federal government itself doesn’t know exactly how many Federal laws there are, but there is an estimate of about 10,000.
The cop said something that surprised me. When he records an interview, after it is transcribed and printed, he immediately erases the tape for re-use. It is not evidence, there is no requirement to keep it for trial. His testimony and notes about what was said are enough. So if the cop or the transcriptionist makes an error, that error is more or less permanent and unchangeable, and will boil down to a question of who the jury chooses to believe if there is a dispute about what was really said.
The OP asked, “Can I plead the fifth amendment even on cases where it’s obvious that I wouldn’t be incriminating myself?”, and the short answer is, "You can never know what will/may incriminate you. "
The law professor who gives the lecture presents examples where an [innocent] person tells only the truth, has it videotaped and can verify his/her story. Even then, something you may say to the police may incriminate you.
I thought that both speakers were pretty entertaining, and would agree that it’s almost never in the best interest of someone suspected of a crime to talk to the police without his lawyer present, but that people usually do.
the lecture is to law students. What impressed me was that the speaker warned the students that he would ask them a question about the lecture and they had to be careful about their answer. Later in the lecture the speaker asked a question and more than half the class incriminated themselves to the point where they could have been arrested for murder. Amazing.
[the speaker initially told the class that there had been a drug-related killing of three people in town. Later he asked the class how many people had been shot. More than half the class picked 3. Since only the murderer and the police know that the people had been shot…]
A parent is likely to be the first suspect when a child is missing (think Jon-Benet Ramsay). Plus, the police will want to search the home completely, which would permit them to discover any unrelated illegalities that one might have going on. And yet presumably nearly every parent is going to cooperate fully.
So it’s senseless to say, “never talk to the police about anything,” because no one is prepared to follow that rule to the letter in real life.
The relevant question is thus, where do you draw the line? If you’re willing to run the risk of talking to the police when it’s your child who’s missing, then why not your neighbor’s child? The woman across the street? Someone at work?
When this immunity is granted in relation to the bank robbery, does that mean that the prosecutor agrees to never charge you with bank robbery, or that he simply won’t use what you say as evidence against you regarding that bank robbery?
If it’s the second, then it seems like you would be giving him an excellent blueprint to find evidence by other means. Didn’t John Dean get screwed in a similar manner?