I was watching “Justice League” earlier and Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth gets used a few times in the movie. For those who do not know anyone she lassos with it is compelled to tell the truth (it is magical so it just works like that).
Sine Wonder Woman is often busting bad guys it made me wonder if this is a violation of the 5th Amendment. At the end of “Justice League” you see some thieves lassoed and spilling the beans with a police officer busily taking notes.
Since Wonder Woman is not a government agent does that mean no 5th Amendment violation? She is more a vigilante and the police are just taking advantage of it?
Or would the notes the cop was taking from the thieves (mentioned above) be deemed inadmissible in court?
The Bill of Rights only applies to the government (Federal and State).
I assume that she would be disallowed from using it if she worked in law enforcement. And, if she just happened to be near law enforcement officers, then whether they could use it or not would depend on whether it really was happenstance or seemed staged to allow them to circumvent the 5th Amendment.
Wonder Woman could probably be prosecuted for coercion, though.
It says coercion occurs with intimidation. That’d be Batman threatening to drop someone off a building unless they talk (which he does in the movie “Justice League”).
Wonder Woman’s lasso does not intimidate. It just makes you tell the truth via magic.
Not that it answers the question but if a lasso of truth actually existed, the 5th amendment would be scrapped as fast as possible, or at least adapted to take into account its existence.
The FAA deals with contrivances that require registration; therefore, superheroes that can fly using their own power are not in violations of any FAA regs. Ironman would have issues.
I think the information would not be admissible in court. However, if you were a cop looking for information about how the mob was operating on a day-to-day basis, it would be well worth your time to take notes.
There was a Venture Brothers episode that dealt with this.
The Wonder Woman parody had a lasso that could compel people to tell the truth.
Unfortunately, it did not seem to be able to make them shut up.
And since they were usually heterosexual males, she generally got a lot more information than she wanted.
The courts have historically taken a fairly broad view of what constitutes the “government” in terms of constitutional violations. Obviously. the government doesn’t exist as a single entity; it consists of thousands of individual people. So it’s individual people, like congressmen and police officers, who can violate your rights.
But take it a step further. Suppose a police officer asks a civilian to go inside a suspect’s unoccupied apartment and look for evidence. Technically, this warrantless search wasn’t conducted by a government representative. But the courts would say “No way. A person acting at the direction of a government employee is a government representative, even if they’re not employed by the government.” And that can be true even if there wasn’t a direct request by the police officer but just an established pattern of the police officer wanting the civilian to search suspects’ homes. Any action initiated by a government employee can be considered a government action, even if it it’s conducted by a non-employee.
This principle could be applied to superheroes. Once the police have established a pattern of accepting the evidence that Wonder Woman gathers via her magic lasso of truth then a lawyer can argue that Wonder Woman is working with the police and she is subject to the Fifth Amendment.
What gets me is, how about situations where the magically-coerced testimony is never mentioned in court? “Yeah, we found the body; and found lots of evidence there, too. And I’ll now talk about said body and said evidence, since there’s nothing interesting about how we found the location and I’m not here to testify about that; instead, my story begins with So There We Were, Digging In The Right Place.”
I believe it WOULD constitute torture. At least as laid out in the recent movie.
Previous iterations of the lasso have just made people speak truth. But in the WW movie, attempting to withhold the truth causes pain to the person being questioned.
Even without it being counted as a war crime, I think such would be considered admission under duress and therefore not admissible into evidence for the purposes of convicting a suspect.
