This is how I thought until I married a man with a number of sworn officers in his family. I was raised with the notion that “policemen* are your friends.” It was my brothers-in-law who told me that if a police officer holding my drivers license asked me “Is your middle name Catherine?” I should say “I’ll tell you as soon as my lawyer gets here.” So far I have avoided testing this theory by staying out of situations that invite questioning by police. That’s how I intend to keep it.
*I’m old enough that police women were rare and inclusive language was even more so.
Your worldview is in desperate need of adjustment.
It’s one thing to answer a quick question from the police that doesn’t really involve you (“Did a man wearing a green hoodie pas this way?”). But if the police are asking you anything more than that, they do NOT see you as a law-abiding citizen. They are seeing you as a potential suspect, and they are most emphatically NOT on your side in that case.
Innocence is no defense against being convicted of a crime (as the folks working for the Innocence Project will be happy to tell you). The police don’t particularly want to arrest innocent people, but they can’t see your shining white soul in all its purity. They can and do sometimes make mistakes. (And that’s leaving out the subject of corrupt cops.)
Talking to the cops in the presence of your attorney will cost you some money. Talking tot he cops without an attorney present could cost you your freedom. Which is more valuable?
You are never “innocent”. It is pretty well impossible to exist in America without violating a few rarely enforced laws. Or, even if no, leading the police to treat you as a suspect, thus incurring large legal expense, possibly a job loss, loss of reputation, etc- even if held “not guilty”.
As soon as they ‘detain” you or read you your rights, or in any way treat you as a suspect instead of a witness- *then STFU and ask for a attorney. *
Now, if you are obviously being treated as a friendly witness, then why not help them?
All my legal study professors said the same exact thing. Be polite to the police but, excluding situations where you obviously need their help, don’t volunteer any information. It probably won’t help you, but it can hurt you, especially if you have something to hide.
Police are professionals, and they realize that some people talk a lot when they’re nervous, say stupid things.
If, god forbid, you’re in an iffy situation, and the police start asking you a lot of questions, it’s perfectly acceptable to ask them if you’re being taken into custody or charged with anything. And if they say no, you can say, “OK, I’m happy to answer your questions, but I’d like to have my lawyer present if we go any further.”
That’s not going to make you a suspect, it’s well within your rights, and if they want to keep talking to you, they’ll say, “OK, then, go call your lawyer”.
Bear in mind that it depends on the country. In the UK (complicated because we have three legal systems [or seven if you include isle of man, gibralter, jersey, gurnesy and sark]):
An adverse inference can be made by the jury against you for a “no comment” interview, or indeed you just not mentioning when asked something that you later try to rely on in court
For a bunch of offences, if you admit it to the police it can be dealt with there and then without going to court. Most often with fixed penalty notices (this even includes stuff like paying £80 fine for shoplifing £500 worth of stereos!) or cautions/warnings.
It’s taken into account in sentencing.
Still, you shouldn’t say anything until you have legal advice. Also, I strongly advise getting better legal advice than I did not so long ago when I was recommended to admit everything by the legal aid duty solicitor. Once I had a lawyer I was paying a few hundred quid an hour for, it became quite clear I’d fucked myself.
If you plan on committing crimes, do your research now to find out which lawyer to call to the police station.
In this thread, and also in the last thread where this came up, for most posts it isn’t clear if people mean before being read your Miranda rights, or afterward. It’s hard to believe that being read your Miranda rights has no bearing on this.
If you are arrested, anything you freely say to the police (either before or after they read you your rights) is admissible in court. And the police are VERY good at convincing people to talk to them. So the moment you think they are seeing you as anything other than a witness, SHUT UP!
But you can’t assume you know the moment they start seeing you as anything other than a witness, plus your “witness” statements can still be used against you. That’s why a no-talk-to-police-ever position is not unreasonable. May not be great in some cases (and like I said, I personally would not even abide by it all the time) but it’s pretty much their own fault (collectively) if you won’t, not yours.
You are right. Public defenders are utterly useless. This happened to me too, freaking retarded public defender told me just to tell the police “everything”, but I knew better than that and didn’t. These retarded public defenders do more harm for you than good.
That’s where hardened criminals actually have an advantage: they are familiar with the system. Most law-abiding citizens rarely need lawyers, and almost never for criminal defense purposes. If you do find yourself arrested, you may have to use your one phone call to contact a family member or good friend and have them locate a good attorney for you.
You’d think. But most of those dudes do not learn. Thing is, I’d make a better criminal and probably so would you, but that’s (in part) why we’re NOT criminals (at least I’m not…not so sure about you ).
Also, if you’re in that gray area, not arrested and not being officially interrogated as a suspect, you’re generally not entitled to a public defender, though you can certainly hire one on your own dime.
Instead of talking to police without a lawyer, or lawyering up first, isn’t it also an option to simply keep your mouth shut and refuse to answer all (or most) questions, even without having a lawyer on hand?
If cops question me, or even detain me and haul me to their interrogation room, can’t I just STFU? And if so, and if I know that, what difference does it make if they’ve read me my Miranda rights or not, if I already know that?
This all came up on a previous thread on this subject, and I didn’t feel that anyone offered a straight answer.
I cannot answer for every country every, but certainly in the UK and US yes you can certainly just STFU and say nothing.
TBH in the UK the police will be really nice and get you a lawyer without prompting. I have no idea what happens in the US except in the general sense that US interrogations are a lot looser. For example in the UK the police are not allowed to lie/mislead; in the US the whole basic technique of doing interrogations is about lying/misleading.
If you want a cool book, get Criminal Interrogation and Confessions by Reid et al.
There are corrupt police everywhere, and it’s generally not public knowledge (the corrupt ones you’re likely to know about have probably been let off the force if they were in the news). Also, to some cops, everyone looks like a criminal.
IANALawyer, but AFAIK, without a particular rather bizarre exception, yes you can STFU. If you STFU, I don’t think it particularly matters if the police fail to give you your Miranda, as the penalty for them failing to do so is that whatever statement you made can’t be used against you. But you didn’t make a statement, so…
The rather bizarre exception is that you actually have to state you’re claiming your right to remain silent. Just a couple of years ago the Supreme Court ruled that simply remaining silent didn’t constitute invoking the right.
Count me as someone else totally surprised by the prevailing attitude in this thread.
Various people have said that, if the police are not asking you something akin to “Which way did the guy carrying the gun go?”, they consider you a suspect in whatever they are investigating. And while this may be true on some level, in that the police consider pretty much everyone a possible suspect, I hardly think it merits completely stonewalling the police as many people in this thread seem to recommend.
Sure, if I were actually guilty of something, I wouldn’t talk to the police without a lawyer. And if there were a situation where it was conceivable that the evidence might point to me as the guilty party (e.g. a theft of an expensive item from work or something), I might ask for a lawyer depending on the circumstances.
But if my best friend were murdered by an unknown person while I was at work and the police wanted to talk to me to assist in their investigation, I would do whatever I could to help. I certainly wouldn’t say “No, I’m not going to help you solve my friend’s murder without my lawyer present.”