Hi,
I just read your piece on police being able to lie during questioning suspects. In the piece you write that extrinsic misrepresentation can be considered coercive and can be invalidated in court. You list “Promises of more favorable treatment in the event of a confession” as an example. How do you separate an extrinsic misrepresentation and actually making a deal? I’ve only seen this is movies and TV but a cop will say “…if you go on the record, I can guarantee you a minimum sentence”. Is there a difference regarding an actual agreement vs a lie, or is the media simply not following correctly?
xxx
Hi u06535.
It’s appreciated if you link to the column in question. That’s as easy as cutting and pasting the link in your message - and the software turns it into a link, like this:
I think that’s the column you had in mind. Enjoy the SDMB!
I’m not affiliated with law enforcement or the legal profession (spit!), but this is what I’ve been led to believe…
The police cannot make any promises or guarantees about what you will be charged with or how lenient the sentencing will be. Their job is to arrest you. The District Attorney decides what to charge you with, and the Judge or Jury decides your guilt, and the Judge takes the Jury’s recommendations into account when deciding your sentence.
All the police are promising you is that when the District Attorney’s office speaks to them, they’ll tell them that although you are guilty as heck and not deserving of the air you breathe, you’re a swell guy who cooperated with them and ratted on everyone you had ever met. Maybe they’ll say that you’re just a nebbish who got caught up in something over your head and couldn’t find an easy way out.
Either way, I don’t know that it means much. The Prosecutor is going to do what makes him and his department look best.
One should not ever rely on the media to accurately demonstrate the finer workings of the legal system. It just wouldn’t make Good Television[sup]TM[/sup]
u06535 said:
As I understand it, the police cannot make deals. Only the District Attorney can. So if you are talking to the cops, the best they will give you is telling the DA that you may be a sorry scumbucket, but at least you cooperated and ratted out everyone else.
The police cannot make deals, as others have said. Only the DA can, it’s between him and your lawyer.
The police can say whatever they want - but as Cecil points out, if there’s a hint they “coerced” any admissions, those admissions may be tossed out of court. After all, if the cops tell me “you’ll get a lighter sentence” I may figure “I’m innocent but things look so bad I might as well make up a confession and cut my losses”. Then there’s doubt as to whether you really admitted to it, or just made it up to stop the beatings or cut your jail time in half or whatever.
OTOH, in Canada many many years ago, a guy sued the police for forgery. they presented him with his girlfriend’s signed confession and said, if you don’t confess too, this will put you away for a long time. He knew it was fake, and once his lawyer sprung him, he claimed that signing his gf’s name on a document was forgery. The Canadian Supreme Court was always willing to side with the police in the days before the bill of rights; so they decalred anything the police present to you during interrogation is legal, even forgery.
The cops don’t care what’s right or wrong. They already know in their heart all of you did it. They just want a signed confession so they don’t have to do real detective-work. then they can wrap it up as a closed case, and take it to the district attorney to get their doggy-bone.
Unless it’s a murder case, do you think they spend days and days chasing down a suspect and collecting evidence (and more days typing the reports, and testifying in court)? Not for a minor crime. Otherwise, we’d need 10 times as many police officers.
Actually, that’s a staff report that I wrote. Moved from Comments on Cecil’s Columns to Comments on Staff Reports.
**
Gfactor**
Moderator
As others have said, police typically don’t have the authority to grant immunity, or bind the state to agreements about charges or sentencing, although, I did note in the report that:
Yeah, until your ass is in a crack. Then you expect us to work miracles for free.
:rolleyes:
Let’s just allow that we have a mutual contempt for each other and accept personal responsibility that this unpleasant confrontation was brought about by our own actions. We are both equally guilty and it is nobody’s fault but our own.
> AHEM! < ::: MODERATOR COUGHS FOR ATTENTION :::
I feel the need for a friendly caution.
Oakminster and Nunzio: As long as these insults are kept on a professional or wide group basis, that’s fine. As soon as they degenerate to personal level, it’s not. I think you’re both talking about large groups of people (lawyers, law-offenders, whatever) and so are OK, but the wording is getting a little ambiguous. When I see words like “you” and “we,” I’m not sure if we’re on a high-plane group level or a down-in-the-dirt personal level. So let’s please keep discussion insult-free and within the rules, right?
For the record: group insults are permitted, so long as they’re not pointedly personal.
For clarification, see: Forum Rules Post #3 and FAQ: Rules of the SDMB
Presumably the police can bring in someone from the DA’s office who can make an agreement with the suspect and his lawyer.
(At least that’s how it works on Law and Order! 
)
This is true, but it’s pretty rare for a plea bargain that requires the defendant to provide evidence to not involve the defendant pleading guilty–so the issue raised by the OP doesn’t come into play. You’d need to have a scenario where the defendant is falsely promised leniency if he provides information, after which the authorities use the information against the guy and refuse to honor the deal. One case where this does come up is where the offender provides false information. As we’ve seen on Law and Order (and the cases bear this out) part of the deal is that you provide true information, so if you told some big lies, any true information you gave could be used against you.
Law and Order is pretty good in trying to keep things close to the reality of the legal system, although limited by the demands of TV and Hollywood’s total disregard of reality.
Police always say “it’ll go easier if you co-operate” and guess what? The legal system rarely cares. How you behaved during interrogation is totally irrelevant to the issue in the trial - your guilt or innocence. It might be mentioned in terms of mindset for sentencing - “the defendant shows total disregard for the seriousness of his crime and no remorse” but unless you laugh in the face of the police, it’s hard to bring that fact up at trial.
The police have one job - find someone who can be charged, preferably with sufficient evidence to convict; not to find the truth, or “justice”. With the huge number of recent acquittals due to DNA re-testing of old crimes, is it any surprise to find they are happy to accept any suspect who is sufficient to close the books at their end? (Is it any surprise the justice system in many states is actively fighting new requests to test DNA in old cases as “unneccessary” - case is settled?) Is it any surprise to find, as in cases like “Hurricane” Carter, that they will even manufacture or ignore obvious problems to close a case? Nobody in the police department (or many other jobs) gets brownie points for making things more complicated by bring up objections.
Police will say and do anything they can get away with. It amazes me how on a show like Law and Order, guys can sit there being interrogated nowadays for hours without saying “where’s my lawyer?”.
And oh yeah - I’ve known a few police. It’s got to be hard to be upbeat and optimistic about people when you spend your whole career mucking out the sewage of the human social condition.