Related: What if a cop asks to see your identification? Yes, I know that you are not required to carry it, but what if you are carrying it as most of us usually do?
Can you refuse to hand it over? Would that not be obstructing his investigation?
The best advice, if you think you could be in legal trouble is to keep your mouth shut and ask to contact your attorney.
You can be compelled by a court to testify, but only if the court has first granted you immunity on your testimony. For example, you were involved in a particular crime and plead the fifth in court because what you would say could incriminate you in a crime and could be used as evidence. The court could grant you immunity, and then compel you to testify.
If you are granted immunity on your testimony, you can still be charged for the crime, but your testimony cannot be used as evidence. And, no evidence based upon your testimony can be used.
For example, you said “I robbed the bank, and threw the gun in the creek”. The police can’t arrest you due to your testimony (if you were granted immunity). And, they can’t search the creek for the weapon, find it, dust it off, and then arrest you for the crime since they could only locate the gun due to your testimony.
However, if they find a friend of yours who said you told them that you threw the gun in the creek, they can then go to the creek and retrieve the gun.
This only covers criminal matters. Civil matters are different.
This depends on the type of immunity granted. You re speaking of the more common “use immunity” here. Under some circumstances a broader form, “transactional immunity,” may be granted, where in exchange for the testimony, the court grants the witness complete immunity from any prosecution for any charges resulting from the incident testified about. Relevant Wikipedia article
Anecdotal?
If a state prosecutor offers a witness transactional immunity, compelling them to testify, could a federal prosecutor then attempt to convict the witness for crimes revealed in testimony, or does state-offered immunity bind the federal government, too?
Sure, but I was trying to explain the from my perspective this:
In the UK our equivalent of the Miranda warning was amended to state that while the right to silence remains in place, courts and juries are can use that silence to infer guilt.
The wording is now “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
This is to prevent the accused from inventing an excuse at a later date (“I didn’t tell the constable, but I was actually with my grandma at the time, and she’s now tragically passed away so you can’t question her to validate my story”), but juries are also free NOT to draw any inferences from a statement which was not offered at the time of arrest.
I am a criminal defense lawyer. Your conclusion is incorrect, at least in my jurisdiction… and I suspect most in the U.S.
A citizen bystander has no affirmative duty to assist in a police investigation. You could certainly be charged with obstruction if you, say, trip the officer as he ran by… or if you tell him the guy ran up the street and took a right on Main, knowing that to be false. Basically you can’t lie. But you can certainly keep your mouth shut.
Obviously the problem here is becoming a more attactive “person of interest” than the original perp. This reminds me of the seminal “hot pursuit” case we read in law school. A dude is sitting quietly in his house, watching tv and bagging up his marijuana. He had the screen door up to let the breeze in. All the sudden, some guy goes tearring through his house, followed closely by a bunch of cops in hot pursuit. You could almost hear the cops screeching to a halt as they saw the mounds of weed sitting on the table. They never arrested the guy who was running. :eek:
Why would it have dust on it? 
On a more serious note, what you’ve said is exactly correct as pertains to use immunity. There is also transactional immunity, and to quote myself from back in February 2001:
That applies only to self-incriminating testimony, i.e. testimony that implicates you in a crime. You can be compelled to testify to embarrassing-but-legal things, e.g. “yes, I was banging my neighbor’s wife at the time,” since you aren’t confessing to criminal activity.
See link in post #4.
My understanding is that it is not just confessing to criminal activity, but confessing to anything that may be used as evidence in any criminal proceeding, and thus is a greatly expanded right, especially since neither you nor the court know what could count as evidence of any crime.
For example, in a case totally unrelated to the one you’re testifying in and unknown to you, someone you hate might have been murdered that night, an hour after your tryst, half a mile from the seedy hotel room you and your neighbour’s wife booked for a few hours under assumed names. What was previously testimony that established embarrassment for you, now establishes opportunity to commit this other crime.
Since you can not know all of the myriad ways your testimony can lead to incrimination, a wide range of testimony is protected.
Yup. In Civil matters (where you can’t get thrown in jail, but could get fined), you don’t have this right. If, for instance, the EPA asks if you let toxic waste run into the river, you can get fined for not answering (in addition to fines for the toxic waste itself).
It would seem that under this standard, everyone could refuse to testify to anything.
For example, if I saw my next door neighbor running from his house with a bloody knife in his hand and the next day his wife turns up dead, I’m clamming up because the prosecutor might decide to charge me as an accessory.
Immunity you say? Well, what if we use the trick from your example and some other acquaintance was found murdered near my home. My testimony proves that I was home and a suspect.
Surely that standard can’t be right because again, I could pull the “some acquaintance may be found murdered nearby” as an opportunity to take the 5th.
Maybe they ought to install showers in the PD HQ’s locker room.
Re: use vs transactional immunity
Let’s say that the perp (after being granted use immunity) said, “Yes, I shot him, and then I threw the gun in the creek. In fact, I told everyone I know that I threw the gun in the creek. Everybody in town saw me throw the gun in the creek.”
Could statements from witnesses then be used to say, “Yep, he threw it in the creek,” and therefore be used to bring charges?
But isn’t this a joke, since we’ve seen one after another government or corporate official say “they can’t recall” virtually anything they were responsible for?
Well, two things. First, they are answering. It’s not a useful answer, but that’s not their problem. It may be a false answer, and if they can be proved to be lying, the lying is in itself a crime, but the proving is of course a bit difficult with an answer like that.
Secondly, if these are possibly criminal matters, then we’re back to having the fifth apply. The requirement to answer is only for civil matters, where only money is at stake; if jail is on the line, you do have the right to remain silent.
IANA criminal law expert, but my understanding – which is assuming the rules are similar to evidence obtained illegally – is that yes, the witness statements could be used, but only if the cops found out about the witnesses in some way other than the immune testimony. So if before the testimony the cops already had a statement from Jack saying he saw the perp throw the gun in the creek, then the cops have every right to go search the creek, even though the perp said that Jack saw him throw the gun away.
On the other hand, if before the testimony, the cops had no idea who Jack was, and had no reason to talk to him, then they can’t use the testimony to go find Jack, get a statement, and search for the gun.
There’s the middle ground, where the cops hadn’t yet talked to Jack before the testimony, but they would have done so even without the testimony (best case: the police had already scheduled an interview with Jack, specifically about what he saw the perp do). In that case, the cops can argue that even without the testimony, they would have discovered Jack’s evidence anyway. It’s not a free pass, the judge gets to decide whether or not to buy the cops argument.
Frankly a lot of this comes down to the jurisdiction/state, how officers and judges interpret and apply laws and the quality of the attorneys involved.
One thing to keep in mind is if officers see suspicious behavior, they usually have the right to do a a frisk search. See Terry V. Ohio.. So, you could refuse to answer questions, but if there is suspicion, they can search you and probably detain you (really depends on circumstances). What is deemed suspicious may be very subjective and subjectivity isn’t going to bode well for a defendant in court, especially if something incriminating turns up.
Use common sense. The problem with not answering questions is that if you are detained, your treatment and time spent locked up may well correlate with your lack of cooperation. On the other hand, in the grand scheme of things, if you have something to hide of course its is “better” (for you) to keep your trap shut.