And since most jurors understand that fact, they actually don’t tend to think it is incriminating.
Your neighbor gets murdered. He’s been a close friend for 15 years. You are grieved at his loss, and had nothing to do with his death, but some circumstantial evidence (like your DNA in his living room from when you had a nosebleed while watching football with him) makes you a suspect.
The police or prosecutors ask you if you’ve ever had a disagreement. In 15 years of course you did. But answering honestly might prejudice investigators or jurors against you unfairly. So you plead your 5th Amendment right not to answer and incriminate yourself.
This situation can’t be that rare and it illustrates why this right is not only just but is one of the 10 rights added to the US Constitution at its ratification. It’s that important. And it has only been reinforced over time (through Miranda and such).
In certain cases, like before a grand Jury, you can be compelled to talk, but they have to give you immunity. (simplistic version)
Even if they ask you point-blank “Did you commit this particular crime” and the answer is no… you still might decline to answer if you suspect that subsequent questions might eventually get around to asking you about a crime which you know you did commit. You might decide it’s better to just stop the line of questioning as soon as you see it coming.
However, as relates to Detective Furhman, I believe he was actually asked if he had EVER planted any evidence, in that case or in any other case. It’s easy to see that he might have planted evidence in other cases and not this one yet be reluctant to admit such under oath.
I hate ‘true crime’ stuff, I’m not a sports fan, and it was obvious from day one that he was guilty, so I didn’t pay much attention to the OJ trial. And, for the same reasons, I don’t want to slog thru all the detritus the internet has to offer on it.
But going from memory, was Furhman ever even asked, “Did you manufacture or plant any evidence”? Because I recall that what he had previously been asked was if he ever referred to anyone using the word ‘nigger’ and he testified “No.” Then the defense produced tape recordings to the contrary (from an old case), and that’s what he was asked about and that’s what he took the Fifth to.
Which, IMO, still has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on OJ still being obviously guilty…
Also it is a variation on never talk to cops where anything you say that is mistaken or ambiguous is basically lying.
“Were you at the Circle K at 9pm on the night in question?”
“Yes I was.”
“Interesting because the cameras show you arrived at 9:02 pm.”
You just perjured yourself.
Most such laws have words to the effect that the misstatement must be knowing or material. For example, the relevant federal law 18 U.S. Code § 1001 says:
A prosecutor would have to prove that the two minute mistake was knowing and willful and that it was material.
I have no doubt that somewhere, sometime a cop tried to intimidate a subject by telling him a trivial mistake was going to land him in jail: “You just committed perjury! You better tell us the whole story now or we’ll arrest you for that.” But a simple, non-deliberate mistake isn’t often going to lead to a conviction.
Because unscrupulous prosecutors can creatively twist any statement you make to try to use it against you.
Or, even if you are innocent of the alleged crime in question, the prosecutor may intentionally try to get the suspect to reveal information that could be used as evidence of another law that was broken. If prosecutors can’t convict a defendant of one charge, they will often times desperately try to find anything else that can be used against the defendant, to “win” their case. Especially if the defendant has not been released on bail and has spent many months in jail, it doesn’t look good for the prosecution if the accused is innocent.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if OJ had testified, he wouldn’t have been legally permitted to invoke the fifth amendment to conceal his involvement in the two murders. You can choose not to testify at all, but if you do choose to testify, you don’t get to pick and choose which questions you answer on cross-examination.
True.
There’s also unrelated guilt. Like, if you’re on trial for murder, you might not want to answer the question ‘Where were you on the evening on the 15th of August?’ because you were fifty miles away from the murder, robbing a bank.
On the contrary, you probably should answer such a question, given that the penalty for murder is a lot higher than the penalty for robbery. If you choose to plead the fifth here, your defence had better be pretty solid in the absence of an alibi.
Fuhrman was asked about planting evidence and took the fifth, but he did so when the jury was not present. That does not mean that he was admitting to planting evidence. He had previously been asked about using racial slurs and had denied under oath that he had in the previous ten years. A recording surfaced of him using racial slurs while telling stories to a screenwriter. After that he was advised by his lawyer to take the fifth. In order to be able to take the fifth about the racial slurs he had to take it about the evidence planting since you can’t choose to answer some questions and not others.
Or just convince the jury that I’m a liar and will save anything to save my friend.
Oh, ok. Thank you for the clarification. Like I said I didn’t pay much attention to it, then or now…
Not only the defendant can’t be forced to take the stand in the French system, but he’s not allowed to do so, even if he wanted to.
(he can be interrogated, speak freely, answer witnesses, or whatever, in fact a defendant typically speaks a lot during his trial by comparison with an American trial, but he can’t ever testify or be put under oath. A famous instance in a high profile trial involved a defendant shouting, at his lawyer’s prompting, “I swear, on my honor as a soldier, that I didn’t stab her” which wrecked havoc in the trial)
My courtroom experiences are, thankfully, not many, but I have pleaded the Fifth when testifying as a witness. After some time testifying away, things were starting to get … personal … not meaning about my sex life, but that the trial was going badly (the defendant was Eli Lilly, the makers of Prozac). The plaintiff was a recent widow of my best friend, who killed himself; her lawyer began to go off on me, and eventually the Judge (not me) stopped him and advised me quite strongly to get a lawyer, and told her lawyer that everything was on ice until I did.
Long story short, my guy advised me that at this point the widow (slightly deranged with grief and anger) was entertaining ideas of suing me (even longer story) and why give her more stuff.
The best part was saying to her lawyer “pursuant to my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, I choose not to answer that question” and then watching the stenographer write it down. And damned if I didn’t say exactly that after each of the next four or five questions; I might even have said “U.S. Constitution”–it just felt so goddamn good and made me feel proud, patriotic.
Until the Judge told me to knock it off, and just say something like (I wish I could remember the exact words) “I choose not to [something something] Fifth.” And after two more of those he asks me if that’s the way it’s going to be for every question–Yessir!–at which point he dismissed me.
I never heard from the woman again, at the end of the day. Plus she had to pay my lawyer fees.
Here’s a lawyer who strongly disagrees with you:
And a cop who also thinks that trivial mistakes can be extremely bad for you:
Inaccurate testimony is routinely used to make a defendant look like he’s lying, it’s not something that is rare to the point of ‘somewhere, sometime’.
I’m not going to watch your videos but I am pretty sure neither thinks that saying you arrived at 9:00 when you really arrived at 9:02 means your credibility has been impeached.
To the contrary, that’s pretty much just what they say or imply. The videos are long but they are full of examples of how you can screw yourself over by talking to investigaters when you:
A) don’t understand the rules
B) don’t know what they’re trying to get out of you
C) don’t have the experience to know all the tricks used to use your words against you
Not only does the professor give an example where a little factual slip up or exageration can be used against you, he also gives one of how making a completely accurate statement can still be turned against you ( by there being a believable witness who says something different than you)… And further yet he gives an example of how you can say something totally true, and how your words can be selectively recited later to cast you in a bad light. He also talks about how you can’t simply just correct the misuse of your statements by police during your trial, nor that the prosecution actually has to prove what they claim is absolutely true… They just have to present a better case than you.
It’s precisely the assumption so many people have that simply telling the truth to the best of your abilities cant hurt that gets people into trouble. Prosecutors love that assumption
and defenders hate it.