But don’t *admissions *usually require some corroboration ,at least that a crime has been committed, to be admissible? The uncorroborated rape allegation is different- that’s not an admission.
If I swallow a condom filled with heroin, and then walk into a police station and announce that I have just swallowed a condom full of heroin, does that “count?”
Not enough for a search warrant, really? Is there a principle that makes it universally not sufficient?
If say, a body was found, clearly murdered, and later Joe Feeblebrink accidentally e-mails his diary to someone, with entries that include non-public information about the murder, and a description of where the murder weapon was hidden, that wouldn’t be enough probable cause to do a warrant to search for the weapon in that spot?
I, for one, am shocked by the FBI’s ongoing refusal to arrest Mick Jagger after he publicly admitted to killing the Kennedys.
You’re the lawyer. Why don’t you provide a proper legal answer here in GQ?
He named “you” too. Have you been looking over your shoulder all these years?
Yeah, I don’t agree that it’s not enough for a search warrant
I think they absolutely have probable cause to now go get a warrant to search your house/car for evidence of drug paraphernalia. They certainly have reasonable suspicion to pat you down for evidence of contraband on your person. You should expect to be detained while they investigate further.
Yeah, people get arrested for having balloons of drugs in their stomach even when they don’t confess to it.
But, I have seen cases where the amount of drugs is so small that the testing of it dissipates it, so they end up dropping the charges.
You do need evidence of the drugs in court, beyond just the confession. Otherwise, how do we know that the guy swallowed heroin?
Assuming we’re at trial, he is no longer admitting to it. So, before he was just joking. Or it was injected into him by somebody else (perhaps unwittingly; after all, why else did he just walk into a police station and tell them?!). You don’t have evidence of possession beyond a reasonable doubt, do you?
Well, do the cops collect any actual evidence other than your confession? Like, what if you don’t swallow a condom full of heroin, and then you walk into the police station and announce that you’ve swallowed a condom full of heroin?
Do the cops just take your confession, and hand it over to the prosecutor for a slam-dunk open and shut case? Or do they try to figure out if there’s any other evidence that a crime took place, other than your say-so?
As you are no doubt aware, people will sometimes contact the cops and confess to crimes they didn’t commit, for various reasons that seem good to them. The justice system doesn’t have to take confessions to crimes at face value.
There’s a quiz show over here, the UK, called Eggheads, in which teams take on a panel of quiz experts. Not exactly noteworthy on its own but one of the resident experts, CJ de Mooi, was arrested after putting a bit too much information in his autobiography - to wit, he killed a tramp in Amsterdam.
From Wiki - On 21 September 2016, de Mooi was arrested at Heathrow Airport in connection with claims, which he had reportedly made in his autobiography, that in 1988 he had punched a drug-addicted mugger and thrown him into a canal in Amsterdam. De Mooi was detained under a European Arrest Warrant issued in the Netherlands. A judge at Westminster Magistrates’ Court declined the extradition request on technical grounds, on 24 October 2016, saying that no UK arrest warrant had been issued.
There is of course Marquis de Sade, who was imprisoned for writing Justine and Juliette.
But he was never brought to trial (he was ultimately committed to a mental institution where he died so you can’t say whether he was actually imprisoned for publishing an obscene novel, rather than the sex crimes in the book (which were fictional accounts written from a female protagonists point of view, but clearly contain auto-biographical elements)
Call the officer who heard the confession to the stand and say that at 8pm on October 4, 2018, the Defendant, John Smith, seated right there, walked up and said that he had injected heroin into his arm fifteen minutes prior.
If the defense is “Yes, that is true, but you have no physical drugs as proof so piss off” then I as a juror am convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that at around 7:45pm on that date, the Defendant did indeed possess heroin.
Objection, hearsay, your honor.
Hard to imagine that’s true to nearly the extent you describe.
For example, ISTM that many people have been convicted of murder without the prosecution alleging knowledge of exactly when or where the murder was committed.
Objection overruled. Statement by a party.
Sit down counselor.
Another outburst like that and you’ll be placed in restraints!
If you drove to the police station before confessing to using drugs there, you could easily be charged with driving while impaired by alcohol or drug, or whatever the local statute is. Your confession + evidence from blood or fail a screening by a cop qualified as drug recognition expert would be enough. At the very least,they’d lock you up until sober just like any other drunk driving arrest.