We already have purjury law, which are so routinely broken by the police there's a common term for it. Testilying.
Purjury is supposed to be serious. But it's not enforced against police officers. Other misconduct like prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence is also rarely if ever punished even when blatently proven and widely publicided.
So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
What happened to Ted Bradford is awful. The fact he actually eventually was exenorated was like winning the lottery. For most falsely convicted, a statistical impossibility.
IMO the point of stopping police from lying shouldnt be to prosecute the police (as perjury is already illegal), but rather, to indemnify the person who was lied to for actions they took under false pretenses. So, if the police lie to you and say "we have you on camera at the 7/11" and as a result you say "I dont really recall..maybe I got a soda from there and dont remember?" that second statement shouldnt be used against you if they dont actually have you on camera whereas today that statement would be used to show that you couldve been there (because you said so yourself). This is easy to demonstrate in court and consequently toss out that secondary statement which would otherwise be evidence.
> as a result you say "I dont really recall..maybe I got a soda from there and dont remember?" [...]
> today that statement would be used to show that you couldve been there (because you said so yourself).
They can use "I don't remember" ?
Isn't the whole point of interrogation to get a suspect to make conflicting statements, then pressure them when the statements don't line up as a means to get a confession?
Why is this a bad thing? If this tool goes away, couldn't conviction rates plummet (for eg. violent crimes)?
I'm having trouble seeing an ethical problem here?
They absolutely can, and will use that in a court of law. Any comment that you make that seems completely fine from your perspective can quickly be turned around to lock you up.
The reality in the US is if you want re-elected you better be tough on crime, which means people going to jail. No one seems to give a shit if the people that committed the crime are going to jail, as long as someone is found guilty.
No they care. They make sure that the people doing the crimes remain free to abuse the innocent. Hint: it's the police and politicians (and their buddies) committing a lot of the crimes.
> Why is this a bad thing? If this tool goes away, couldn't conviction rates plummet (for eg. violent crimes)?
Even if they do, the real question is whether false convictions will plummet more than true convictions. There are an awful lot of people who "confessed" to crimes didn't commit.
Here's a hot take -- maybe we could just make self-incriminating statements inadmissible altogether unless it's given as testimony, verbal or written and signed while not under duress.
If the only evidence the police have is what you say, then that should be insufficient.
In the USA you have the fifth amendment right against self incrimination.
Also you have NO obligation to say anything to police in an interrogation and can always request an attorney to speak on your behalf. Subjects are reminded of this during the reading of Miranda Rights.
If you are ever in a police interrogation you should always decline to speak without an attorney.
It is bewildering why people don't exercise their rights.
Let's try this thought experiment. You are shopping at a grocery store. It's a regular day in your life. Then, without warning, you are arrested by the cops and taken to the police station. They put you in the holding cell. They take your laptop, phone, etc. You ask for your one call. They lead you to the wall mounted phone and you stick your quarter in.
What percentage of the HN readership here would be able to dial the number of a competent criminal attorney?
Engagement with the criminal justice system is so out of the ordinary for most people that they simply do not know what to do. It's easy to say, "shut up and call your lawyer", but most regular joes have absolutely no idea how to find a lawyer, vet them, engage with them, etc.
In normal life, if you need a lawyer, you Google some reviews, or you look up something in yellow pages, or you ask your local state bar association for a referral for the area of legal practice. None of those things are happening at 2am in a holding cell without any of your regular devices. And asking for the public defender is not likely to give you much comfort given their caseload.
Now imagine that you are not the classic affluent educated HN reader with access to all kinds of resources, and consider what it must be like for working class people. It's not fun.
You don't call a lawyer, you call the most competent person whose phone number you can remember and tell them to get a lawyer.
Ideally, you have a relationship with one or more, but if you don't come from an upper middle class background with a refined appreciation for insurance policies, now is the time you call your most competent contact and beg them to get the ball rolling on a lawyer and bail.
Part of Miranda is that the state will obtain a lawyer for you. It might be a shit lawyer that just wants to plea, but it stops the self incrimination part.
Yeah and if the shit lawyer doesn't do his job then you have grounds for appeal. Always trust your lawyer to handle your legal business. Should be taught in schools with civic lessons. You literally have nothing to gain from talking to police without a lawyer if you are detained.
It's not bewildering. There are an awful lot of people out there who were raised to trust police as "the good guys" and it's extremely easy for those people to be manipulated into what they think will be a quick interview to help out in solving a case, only to have the spotlight turned on them before they realize what's happening.
Because in most places cops are liars beyond what you'd ever believe.
Civil rights violations are simply status quo. I come from a family with members in law enforcement and the criminal justice system. They have had to kick detectives out of interrogation rooms because the detectives get abusive and simply ignore "I'd like to speak to my attorney". The cops just won't stop harassing, lying, and even abusing the suspect.
Most people are not going to do well in a stressful situation with a person in a position of authority abusing them. And our criminal justice system here in the US is ok with that.
People don't exercise their rights when a) they are not informed of them, and b) they're under duress.
What's more bewildering is why juries (who are not facing jail time themselves) don't find defendants innocent in every case involving the police since it's known that the police are allowed to lie, and it's also known they will face little to no repercussions from doing so even under oath.
The people that get picked for a jury (that make it through all the rounds of vetting) are the types of people who believe the 'justice system' is fundamentally just and that the police are public servants. The people who see through that are filtered out or filter themselves out of the process.
This strikes me as an absurd Reddit tier statement. How many criminal cases do not involve police? You are suggesting juries should throw out ALL cases involving police?
I'm not saying what anybody should do. I'm saying I'm surprised juries don't throw out more cases, given the latitude police have for lying during interrogations and the lack of repercussions for doing so under oath.
--"because if you cooperate with us, everything will go easy, if you keep resisting, thats proof of guilt and youll get the max, plus charges for resisting"
I suggest reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_technique. There's a reason why it's being used, and there's also a reason why many false confessions are attributed to it.
This made me do some research into "hearsay" because I'm not really familiar with how it all works.
> Per Federal Rule of Evidence 801(d)(2)(a), a statement made by a defendant is admissible as evidence only if it is inculpatory; exculpatory statements made to an investigator are hearsay and therefore may not be admitted as evidence in court, unless the defendant testifies.
So it's not hearsay if it makes you look bad (but it is if it makes you look good), and police don't even have to be telling the truth, nor do they really have to be worried about perjury charges if a given encounter was not recorded.
I still can't imagine why a confession given in interview isn't logically nullified by:
On top of that, statistically, a guilty confession results in a massive bias from the jury, often to the point of completely overriding exculpatory evidence (like, say, witness testimonies of alibi, or forensics).
> So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
Easy: because interrogations are videotaped and disclosed to defense attorneys. Currently, police can walk in and say “we found your prints at the scene, so you better start talking”. If an officer did this under the new regime, it would be illegal — and would be disclosed to the defense attorney.
And under the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine, anything elicited by that lie would be excluded from trial.
Basically, the types of lies people make on the stand are hard to disprove. The types of lies that cops tell in interrogations are not hard to disprove. They are also on video, and handed over to defense attorneys.
This the way to stop it. Make it fruit of the poisonous tree and the prosectors will get the cops to shut up, because all their good evidence will be destroyed by it.
It's amazing how much they have to work around things that would incriminate or sway a jury (such as cutting out anything that might reveal priors), and this would be something more.
>Isn't this necessary especially in larger cases where it's necessary to get one suspect to roll over on another?
There are multiple countries where it's not allowed, so it's definitely not necessary.
>As long as defense attorneys are involved, what is the harm in this?
Generally the cops will try as hard as they think they can get away with to keep your attorney away. This article is about someone who immediately asked if he should have an attorney, was told he didn't need one, and when one showed up anyways, he wasn't even allowed to know there was someone hired to represent him.
The harm is that juries and judges really love signed confessions and cops love to pressure for one. The Reid Technique's entire goal is to take someone from saying "no, I didn't do it" to "okay, I'll sign that I did it". Ted Bradford had an alibi and a recanted confession that confessed things that obviously didn't match the facts of the case, and the confession was enough even when he finally had an attorney. It was enough that:
>Despite the exonerating DNA evidence and the fact that Ted had already served his entire sentence for the crime, Yakima County prosecutors chose to charge Ted with the same sexual assault once again, offering his initial false statement in 1996 as the evidence against him.
The harm is that innocent people incriminate themselves. People are not experts on the law and make mistakes all the time. Even if they are eventually exonerated, the process is the punishment and there is no recourse.
Not to mention that defense attorneys are usually overworked, working for free and you generally get what you pay for.
This right here. Any state assigned attorney is going to say "Take the plea". Simply put, most of the suspects do not have the money to present the case as needed in front of the courtroom, and the lawyer states, taking the plea is less apt to bankrupt you.
To be brutally honest, some huge percentage of people who get to the "plea" option are actually and truly guilty - this causes all sorts of issues.
(One of the strange side-effects of mandatory sentencing is removing plea deals because if they HAVE to charge you with X, and guilty or plead on X is Y years in jail, then there is no reason not to go to a jury trial, because the worst case is you get Y years anyway, which you get when you plea out.)
If criminals really were organized and forced everything to jury trials, the United States would collapse.
> As long as defense attorneys are involved, what is the harm in this?
Good point, suspects have a right to an attorney and the right to remain silent. But much of the successful lying probably happens when an attorney isn't present. For example "look, we can wait for your lawyer to get here, but this is looking really bad for you. We just arrested your buddy and once he sings we'll just throw the book at you. If you give your side of the story first, you get the better deal."
A suspect without a lawyer might waive the right to counsel/silence and incriminate himself. Of course, he would be guilty, so it's not entirely clear this is a bad thing (unless he is falsely admitting guilt, which does occasionally happen).
Since I feel that someone who murders or rapes someone should be spared little mercy, then by extension I feel this is an acceptable tool so long as it doesn't harm the innocent.
> Why is this a good thing? Shouldn't cops be able to lie and put pressure on suspects?
The problem is that--so far--we don't have a good way to allow the acceptable kinds while also prohibiting the terrible kinds.
Imagine the police give an overwhelming list of false/non-existent evidence and testimony, so that the average (innocent) person would assume they're being deliberately framed by some power they are unable to fight, and that the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones is to buckle under.
Another example would be where police lie/deliberately-mislead a suspect about the consequences of a confession.
If you have a choice between admitting you did something you didn’t do and get a lighter sentence or know you’re going to be railroaded by the justice system and still lose, which one are you going to do?
And the “defense attorneys” are going to be overworked underpaid public defenders while the prosecutors have what amounts to an unlimited budget
I'd argue you almost have a moral obligation to take the railroading, otherwise society begins to collapse. At least with the railroad there's a chance that the defense is sufficient, that the jury concurs, and the issues get exposed. If nobody fights it, it will metastasize.
I understand how impossibly hard that could be in the moment, but never never go quietly into that dark night.
Unless, of course, you're guilty and you know it, then clap your hands on anything that reduces what you have to suffer for it, I guess.
Okay, so there's a negative externality to this approach. Is there a measure of this?
If preventing cops from lying results in fewer trials going to court for violent crime, then I'd be curious to compare the two figures.
I'm anxious about having fewer tools to investigate and prosecute. We used to have a 70% homicide clearance rate, but that's dropped to just 50% [1]. This feels like we'd be further trying our hands.
Interrogations are not always videotaped. State laws vary widely.
Many states require audio recording only. Other states only require recordings for felony investigations. Many states only require recording of custodial interrogations for specific offenses, such as rape and murder.
At one point, California only required recordings of custodial interrogations involving juveniles suspected of having committed murder, but that might have changed — I haven’t looked into this in a while.
No, interrogations aren't videotaped, at least not always. And even if they are, the police can destroy the video and just use their handwritten notes, and their memory, to testify against you at a trial. Your word against theirs. Tape disappeared. So sorry about your luck.
Believe it or not, at least some judges are severely annoyed by the open, obvious lying officers do. One federal judge declared Boston Police officers and detectives to be liars and unreliable witnesses, for example.
You can throw out evidence gained based on a lie. Only one replier seemed to notice this.
Also, from what I understand perjury is more widespread than you might believe, and tends toward frequent fliers in court. As I understand it, some officers take the attitude "if they're going to lie, I'm not going to commit to always being honest, even if it means letting a POS out"
Don't agree, but just to address the point regarding cops being treated differently. People lie in court all the time, even getting caught red-handed and unprosecuted.
P.S. Regarding that police attitude toward lying, it's the same as any corruption: You might think prosecutors and cops pull out all the stops for the "real bad guys", and this may be partially true; however in reality, it just comes down to who pisses them off the most, which often doesn't have that much to do with whether someone is the worst of the worst.
> Purjury is supposed to be serious. But it's not enforced against police officers. [...]
> So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
I haven't read the text of the bill, but according to this article, evidence obtained during an interview where the cops were lying can be excluded. This forces judges to consider the evidence during pre-trial motions in limine, and if a judge errs in allowing such evidence, that error can be appealed. That doesn't 100% solve this issue, but if enacted this will provide a real remedy. And trial judges hate to be overturned on appeal.
Isn't the problem with perjury that you don't need to prove what you say in court is true, but to prove someone committed perjury you have to prove what they said was a lie?
It's not easy to prove someone lied.
Yet we find it easy to believe what people say is true (even for juries in court).
LOL. Police officers are never prosecuted. And do you know who is prosecuted even less? Prosecutors. And even less than that? Judges.
I think in all of history only one prosecutor was ever prosecuted for what is known in the USA as a "Brady violation", where the prosecutor hides exculpatory evidence from the defense, even though it routinely happens.
I tried repeatedly for many years to bring a prosecution against some cops and prosecutors for hacking offenses, but since there isn't really the concept of private prosecutions in the USA you have to rely on the prosecutor's office wanting to prosecute it's own. I even sued the prosecutor's office to try and enforce it, but the judge told me "Of course police officers are allowed to commit crimes in the course of an investigation." If I get bored at some point I will have the audio recordings pulled from the court and put them online so other people can see the insanity.
Best idea I've heard is that the public defenders office (or whatever, I'm not expert here) should be responsible for investigating and prosecuting police. There's already a natural opposition there. The current system works if people have infallible integrity (hint, they don't), this change would make the system work if people have human nature.
The Public Defenders system is already chronically underfunded, understaffed, and far overworked. Sadly I don't think they would be the best avenue for trying to hold the police to account.
Sounds like there needs to be something like "civil forfeiture" for the Public Defenders system, allowing them to seize the assets of suspected dishonest police and police departments.
Which they can then either keep, or sell off to raise funds for themselves.
Public defenders would need resources akin to or larger than the prosecutor's office in order to take on this role. I don't know that there has ever been a time in America where the public cared more about defending the wrongly accused than convicting the genuinely guilty, but if there was it surely isn't now.
Yeah, sadly, I know your right. But for the sake of argument, the prosecutors office and the defenders office should be equally funded. It should be in the law that they are equally funded.
This makes sense, average people understand that attorneys defending a murderer aren't bad people, those attorneys are just doing their job and they play an important part of the legal system. Fewer think about the imbalance of resources and how that skews the results. It makes sense that examining both sides properly requires equal resources allocated to both sides.
As you say, it's a long shot, but it's an idea worth trying for. If nothing else, maybe people can remember to include it in the next government we form after the collapse (half joking).
Illinois. I wish I had the transcripts, but in civil court in the USA it's unusual as far as I'm aware to have a reporter transcribing. It is usually just recorded digitally, and then if there is an issue (e.g. appeal) the recordings are pulled and transcribed.
I'm assuming, without knowing, that I can have the recordings pulled without paying hundreds of dollars for transcripts. You can't FOIA judicial items in Illinois, but across the country you have a federal constitutional right to judicial items under the 1st Amendment.
In Massachusetts (and presumably elsewhere) you can visit a website and pay $10 to get the "For the Record" audio recording emailed to you. You only need the docket number iirc.
> LOL. Police officers are never prosecuted. And do you know who is prosecuted even less? Prosecutors. And even less than that? Judges.
At some point you have to have someone who is unprosecutable, or you have people who can be influenced.
The king, at the top of this heap, is the jury itself; they cannot be prosecuted for their decision, even if it is obviously, manifestly, completely, pants-on-head-insane.
No you don't, the current English King is named King Charles III. Did you ever wonder about the number?
Charles I was executed in 1649. He kept starting wars, Parliament told him to stop, he wouldn't so they tried him for Treason, he asserted that he necessarily couldn't commit treason because he was the King, but Parliament convicted him and sentenced him to death.
Parliament's rationale, then and now, is that their allegiance is to the Crown, a symbol of the country, not to some bloke who happens to be wearing it. He is just a temporary living symbol, even more replaceable than the (relatively expensive) metal object.
You can prosecute individual members of parliament too, this too isn't a hypothetical, if they're convicted of anything serious enough they automatically lose their seat and a replacement is elected, while for more minor offences like anybody else they might keep their jobs if they can suffer the embarrassment of everybody knowing they're a crook
Unlike in the US no individual holds a "pardon power" which could enable them to nullify a conviction, the Crown Power to do this is in practice exercised via a committee which investigates miscarriages of justice. Of course in principle a British Prime Minister could just insist they have this power anyway, and if a Parliament comprising largely of their party members goes along with it, so be it, on the other hand it's hard to see why the millions of British people who didn't vote for them should accept this, and it's not as though Britain hasn't had civil wars already.
1. The UK parliament reversed course and brought back Charles I's son to be Charles II. In doing to it executed a ton of people responsible for revolt. That included Oliver Cromwell -- despite the fact that he was already dead. They dug him up, tried him, convicted him, executed him, and put his head on a spike for decades. So it's not clear how much power that precedent could hold.
2. Charles III is King of the United Kingdom. The title of "King of England" was retired by Charles I's father. Charles I was King of Great Britain.
I don't know that I'd go so far as to say reversed course. Things didn't go well for Cromwell and the people who executed Charles I but also stuff didn't revert. Charles II is not a modern monarch but when Parliament does stuff he doesn't like he feels obliged to try to dodge that rather than defy them as his father did.
Prosecutors are absolutely immune. Brady violations only invalidate the underlying case and in really egregious cases, ruin future careers in politics, but it doesn't create criminal liability going the other way. Police have qualified immunity, prosecutors have absolute immunity, as long as the charge is something that constitutes their quotidian work.
Private prosecutions do exist, but not on a federal level, and anything falling under the purview of the CFAA - which is the umbrella that hangs over all computer-access-related crimes, is federal by definition. Besides, with parallel construction, they can always legally reverse-engineer a legally sound rationale that doesn't violate the 4th Amendment or what-have-you. However, while prosecutors are absolutely immune, the police are not and therefore are subject, occasionally, to federal-level liability either criminal or civil, although the prevalence of police perjury - testilying, as commonly known - is both an academic niche that has produced plenty of papers and have achieved virtually nothing in the real world. The term came into the public consciousness in 1994 and as late as 2018 I've heard it bandied about by cops in a courthouse. Prosecutors need the cops to investigate (public defenders' have a much smaller team of investigators if you're lucky, but even then anything technical is hopefully something you know enough about to find the right expert and conduct a competent cross examination. The police, of course, have the first mover advantage and so they can set up the fall guy who is already pension-eligible and move their assets out of their name before getting tossed in the gentlest way possible under the minivan. I wasn't involved with the case but the classic WA case involving the police using all of their tools available to rearrange the narrative surrounding a murder caught on camera and a federal prosecution is the Otto Zehm case. I had the luck to see what happened at sentencing and it was frankly sickening. https://www.spokesman.com/topics/otto-zehm/
So, police do get prosecuted, but only below the federal level, and extremely leniently, and if weren't for the video it probably wouldn't have happened. Ten years for a murder caught on video is crazy considering that the feds were giving out pleas of 8 years for "trafficking" 4 pills of Oxycodone before fent got into the supply (also thanks to the feds, as it was entirely supply driven) and ten years after leaving WA I still have former clients incarcerated for much more ambiguous fact patterns and convicted after multiple mistrials. As for the feds, now that Bivens is basically dead, even their own IG reports read like lurid crime novels written in the most lawyerly way possible. And if they're really in trouble, creating a moral panic always works. It had worked so far.
Just to note that prosecutors are not absolutely immune in all cases. They can be qualified immune, like officers.
For instance, in my case the prosecutor's office acted as law enforcement, e.g. they conducted investigations and conducted an arrest and executed a search warrant. In those cases, when they are acting in a nonprosecutorial role, and in a law enforcement role, they are definitely only qualified immune.
In Illinois it was ruled that prosecutors creating their own quasi-police departments is no longer legal. The advantage for the prosecutors was that they could bypass 99% of the laws and regulations that apply to police because they don't fit the statutory or regulatory definition of a police force.
Edit: Also to note, the CFAA has exemptions carved for law enforcement to do things that are criminal if done by the public:
"(f)This section does not prohibit any lawfully authorized investigative, protective, or intelligence activity of a law enforcement agency of the United States, a State, or a political subdivision of a State, or of an intelligence agency of the United States."
Whether or not a particular crime is one that the investigator is allowed to commit in the course of an investigation is extremely fact dependent, so the fact that you haven't included any is a little suspicious.
"(d) This Section does not prevent any lawfully authorized investigative, law enforcement, protective, or intelligence gathering employee or agent of the State or federal government from operating any audiovisual recording device in any facility where a motion picture is being exhibited as part of lawfully authorized investigative, protective, law enforcement, or intelligence gathering activities."
I think this is a separate issue, where officers routinely lie in interrogations to steer the person being questioned. This isn't perjury, because it doesn't happen in court.
A judge will simply throw out any evidence that was facilitated by a lie. Any good defence lawyer would wield this just like they wield bad chain of custody etc.
Nope, the most competent defense lawyers are probably the federal defenders, who is backed by the resources of the feds, and have a much lighter case load, so they're able to actually spend the necessary time to mull over the minutia. They don't get to pick their clients and are frequently forced into being generalists, but on the federal level a lot of the "small time" crimes are kicked down to the state level. The feds prosecute terrorism, the local prosecutors prosecute murder. The thing is, the public have no idea what makes for a good attorney in any particular field (and it's not the jingle or Cellino and Barnes would probably be Supreme Court justices before the firm broke up), and public defenders are among the very few who have no choice in selecting their clients, the strength of the case, and with 80-120 open cases at a time you either really believe that your clients are all innocent or you absolutely need to hold the state to account as a matter of principle or you won't make it through the misdemeanor docket, never mind anything more serious or more sordid (mental health, juvenile).
Public defenders don't get into the line of work as a backup option. At least at my law school, they didn't recruit, because frankly they can't beat private firms or even the prosecutors on just about anything but the possibility of being on the right side of history. The pay barely covers interest on your loans, even during trials you have to run out to fill the meter every 4 hours where I was at - only the police got free parking. Everyone in my class with my skillset ended up at an IP firm or doing in house work somewhere, mostly in the Seattle area but also down to California. I don't regret a minute of the work, but in the grand scheme of things it's impossible to make a difference on any scale when you are an active participant in the system which is inherently skewed and allows prosecutors so much leeway and so much coercive power that the police can totally get away with not outright lying in interrogations and just play on the ignorance of the accused and implied threats and achieve the same result. The lying is just the most fun a cop can have without planting a gun on someone.
Good. I understand that deception is necessary in cases like undercover investigations, but the practice goes far beyond those scenarios. Not just interrogations, either.
> Brian Chaney says he asked for a supervisor during his arrest in Keego Harbor, Michigan, and Police Officer Richard Lindquist told him that another officer present was in charge. The problem: That second officer was not a supervisor or even a member of the Keego Harbor Police Department. Lindquist was never disciplined and his chief says that while a suspect has the right to request a supervisor, what the officer did was OK.
This is speculative and based on a possibly not-representative sample, but what I've noticed from watching bodycam footage is that when the suspect asks for a supervisor, the police give negative/discouraging replies to the suspect while they are also calling a supervisor in the background.
I assume the intention is to comply with the letter of the law while maximizing the chance that the suspect will abandon the request and not force them to wait until the supervisor arrives.
Cops, in general understand the law very well, which makes them even more culpable for their abuses of it.
You see this quite often in the cases where the suspect wants to stop talking and speak to their attorney, and the detectives do the "Oh, yes, we'll let you call them in just one second, but first answer _____"
Ask the police chief; I'd imagine their department policy is that you can request one, given he's stating they do indeed have such a right.
If he wanted to make a "there's no right to a supervisor" argument, he should have. "You have the right, but we'll fake it" is the worst of both worlds.
That's not the problem. If the police don't want to comply with a suspect's request for a supervisor, they can say "no". They shouldn't need to lie to the suspect about who they're talking to and what their roles are; that's an abuse of their position.
Clearly you're not aware of the corruption in the small town government and justice system. If your neighbor is a friend of cop and they don't like you, plenty of cops are willing to put you through harassment and plenty of PDs, local prosecutors and judges who are willing to turn a blind eye towards it.
Essentially, unless you believe every single cop is pure at heart and incapable of making a mistake, you should be wanting a presence of more than just 1 cop.
There isn't one single cop anywhere in America who can go five seconds without saying something false. That's why I don't understand the marginal utility of more cops in the room. The person you want in the room is your attorney.
Ding ding ding ding. Not just that, but you have to affirmatively and unambiguously invoke your 5th Amendment rights. As in, "I wish to invoke my rights under the 5th Amendment of the United States Constitution to remain silent while my lawyer is not present, and I wish to explicitly invoke my 6th Amendment right to counsel." No weasel words, no maybes or I dunnos. Invoke your rights, and if they persist, invoke your rights again, and again, and again. It's the only way to save your ass before the lawyer arrives because the police are simply seeking to catch somebody, not the right person necessarily, and they will literally outsource the lying to the jailhouse snitch to make it happen, amongst other tricks. You can't explain your way out of a situation where the police feels that you are their best shot at getting a perp walk arrange ASAP. Your lawyer can though.
And goddamn the cops will lie to you about how much worse your life is going to get for invoking the 5th. Most people do not have the experience or fortitude to stand up to an authority figure like this, they've been taught just the opposite, and cops know how to abuse the hell out of it.
If it exists, it must be a local thing in Keego. I'm from the same county and I've never been given the advice to ask for a supervisor, only to ask for an attorney.
I'd ultimately disagree with "there's nothing wrong" but I see their point. De jure, the relevant actual "rights" one has are to remain silent and to be represented. It's department policy that allows for a suspect to request a supervisor. It speaks to a corrupt department when they don't discipline the guy for violating said policy but that's not unlawful, just shitty. (Like, why have the policy?)
>I don't think you realize you're arguing against all laws here?
How does the relative concept of "less demand begs less supply" translate into an absolutist eradication argument in your mind?
Ignoring you moving the goalpost from a conversation about law enforcement personnel to a conversation about the legal code. See next.
How does a comment on law enforcement personnel supply (ie: the enforcement part of law enforcement) logically migrate to a comment on the legal code's existence?
I made no such argument. I made a rhetorical point that meant to imply that law enforcement personnel supply (relative ability to enforce the law in any given area), and their techniques, are the outcome of criminality.
Given that LE lying to suspects is not "misbehavior" but a standard investigative technique that falls comfortably within a just legal system.
All evidence has to be disclosed. There are already justifiably harsh laws against falsifying evidence for the purpose of charging suspects.
Suspects have the right to shut up and to an attorney, both of which will fully protect them from being coerced into giving false confessions.
The article is about a case where it was not truthfully disclosed:
>Bradford recalls police making threats and lying to him about DNA evidence they said proved he committed the crime. After hours of interrogation, he confessed, hoping the evidence would acquit him.
"Falsifying evidence" does not apply when it's words spoken during an interrogation. If his confession became fruit of the poisoned tree due to lying to him, it wouldn't have been an issue. At least 10 years of this man's life was lost because non-existent evidence was claimed in an interrogation.
>Given that LE lying to suspects is not "misbehavior" but a standard investigative technique that falls comfortably within a just legal system.
Several other countries don't rely on this "technique". Surely you don't think American cops are so incompetent they can't catch anyone without it.
>Suspects have the right to shut up and to an attorney, both of which will fully protect them from being coerced into giving false confessions.
Except the suspects typically do not know the rules of the game they're being forced to play. The "I want a lawyer, dog" guy knew he had a right to an attorney, he didn't know you need to prompt engineer the police.
>The article is about a case where it was not truthfully disclosed
Meaning that evidence has to be disclosed for trial, after it would serve as part of the predicate for charging the suspect. Though, you knew that.
If the evidence doesn't exist then the charge won't come unless there was a confession. Many such confessions are real. Which is part of why lying about evidence is an investigative technique.
In other words, they won't be politically successful in making a long-standing investigative technique illegal for the sake of suspects. Not when it puts real murderers, and other actually guilty and violent people, behind bars when no other tack was available. Often, these confessions lead to the necessary other evidence. The defense against this tactic is silence and an attorney.
A suspect always has to have an attorney. They should request one ASAP, and keep requesting one while keeping silent. It is ridiculous to assume that cops wouldn't put masses of innocents in jail, should attorney's and the law that protects defendants not exist.
Which means that this particular conversation rests on a silly assumption that a code can protect people in itself, without an attorney. It can't. It won't ever. Make lying illegal: it won't matter in the slightest. What's the concept here: that the law is supposed to protect a suspect in the absence of an attorney, because what? An attorney will arrive later to make sure that the cops follow the letter of the law and to threaten the cops for something that was asked and answered when they weren't present? Good luck with that. It might work a handful of times, and not after. The fact is that suspects need an attorney before they speak, always. Its the only protection.
Evidence does not have to be disclosed as a part of an interrogation. To imply that it might is ridiculous. It can also be lied about as an interrogation technique. The safety against these lies are silence and an attorney (and an innocent conscience as a far distant third).
>Surely you don't think American cops are so incompetent they can't catch anyone without it.
Its amazing that you think that you can be successful in anything with this type of condescending approach. Especially when you are the one that has to convince a large system to change. I can hear your teeth gnashing.
At that point in time someone is at best a subject. Whether they are a criminal or not remains to be seen, you are a couple of steps ahead of the process there.
Is it? Do you have data to back up your data? How often are people convicted with coerced confessions compared to just straight evidence. I did quick search on for data and found this. Should the balance fall on protecting innocent people or prosecuting criminals?
> According to the Innocence Project, almost 30% of convicted people who have been exonerated by DNA testing confess to crimes they didn't commit.
What data of mine is that, which needs backing up?
To gently help you with your attempt to appeal to science , in the vain hope that you aren't tossing word salad.
Again, people have a right to remain silent and a right to an attorney. Two rights that they should ALWAYS exercise.
Coercing confessions is literally how law enforcement gets any confession. If someone confesses, its not up to the cops as to whether or not the confession is true. It is then up to a court. Cops don't convict anyone.
If a suspect messes up and confesses to something that they did not do, then it is up to a jury to exonerate them.
But the suspect is not supposed to forgo their Miranda rights in the first place. Not doing so makes things much better for them.
Literally an attorney is the best and front line legal protection for all peoplle guilty and innocent. The right to one exists.
You want to legally protect people from making self-incriminating false confessions. Cops are not going to be the vehicle for that protection. Again, see the suspect's right to an attorney.
Do you have data for every allowable and disallowable practice in the legal code?
No one is going to concede that procedure, nor anything else in the legal system, requires data to justify itself. Law is a practice.
But if pressed, as many consultants that any municiplaity could afford to hire could go out and cobble together single subject interviews that would stand as "data" or rather what you meant to say: "evidence". All of which would speak highly of the utility of lying (and if the off chance that one or two didn't, those interviews would be excluded as is de facto practice in modern scientific "data collection" whenever politics are involved. The same holds for the inverse interests).
"...if, during the custodial interrogation, a law enforcement officer or juvenile officer knowingly engages in deception."
Hopefully they extend it to adult interrogations.
I just did 10 years in jail waiting for trial before the charges were dropped, partially due to a bogus interrogation (that was ruled unconstitutional by the court) where I refused to talk and they badgered me for 45 minutes after that telling me I couldn't use that right and then threatened my family. That's the point you break, not when the cops hit you with a wrench, but when they threaten people you love.
" ... if you say that X is wrong we throw you in youth care, you get put in a place little better than a summer camp, among criminal youngsters, with 2 adults per 30 kids that don't bring you to school, don't help with homework, where all your stuff is stolen, and we use the police to arrest you if you ever decide to leave until you're 18, when you'll likely have failed all your schooling and be thrown into the street ... "
You cannot be honest to kids about youth services the way it currently exists in the US, in any state. That's just absurd.
Everything I've heard about the institutions for criminal children is pretty horrific. Nearly everyone I spent my time with in jail was in and out of those youth jails/homes as kids and they all sound like mad-houses.
> He said he was asked to waive his rights and when he asked police whether he needed an attorney they said no because they were only asking a few questions. He signed the waiver thinking he was going to help, but a few questions turned into a nearly nine-hour interrogation
How is it we are able to legally "waive rights"? That should be addressed - under no circumstances should a not-yet-convicted person ever be stripped of rights. Voluntarily or not. Otherwise, what are they?
Sure, someone can choose to not exercise them; maybe cooperate with the police, but if at any point they choose they should be available.
They're not being stripped of their rights; they're acknowledging that what they're about to say can be used against them.
Waiving rights is common in American law. Open source licenses waive the right to sue; the third-party doctrine waives the right to privacy of the data that companies take. To some extent, liability releases for participating in dangerous activities waive the right to hold the company you're paying responsible -- think climbing guides, race tracks, sky diving outfits, etc. But from what my non-lawyer self understands, there are some rights you can't waive, like the right to sue over gross negligence.
In this case, it sounds like that waiver was used more as an intimidation tactic to make the suspect believe that they were stuck there and couldn't decide to stop talking. Which... That sounds like something you'd get a lawyer for to help explain the situation.
You have the right to remain silent. You also have the right not to remain silent. Talking after a Miranda warning is taken as a clear waiving of that right to remain silent. You can, of course, stop talking at any time, but they're not going to re-Marandize you after every sentence.
> No signature on paper can force you to keep talking in police custody. You can stop talking at any time, regardless of what you signed.
Cops are very persuasive when they want to get an answer out of you. Say, they arrest you for whatever, and they can just threaten you to remain in custody for a day... no matter if your pet is alone at home and needs to be fed, or your children need to be picked up from school. Sure, you may call a lawyer to arrange for stuff, but we'll keep your house's keys as evidence...
The freedom to not say anything is utterly depending on circumstances allowing you to do so.
This is going to be very unpopular with prosecutors. How are they going to secure convictions against the innocent if they can't lie to them? If it is illegal to say "We have all of the proof we need to convict you, you are going away for life, but if you confess we'll shorten your sentence" when they have no proof at all it's going to put a heavy burden on the prosecutor to get that person in jail.
That's much less impactful though. There's a term of art in interrogation "showing the tools" that is intended to get a person to comply with your wishes. "If you are found guilty" is far less impactful than "We have evidence that you are guilty". The purpose of these interrogations is to secure the conviction, not to discover the truth.
Ironically these techniques work better against the innocent than criminals. The criminals know that the cops lie and that simply shutting up is often a sufficient defense. The innocent get bamboozled and end up with jail time.
> The purpose of these interrogations is to secure the conviction, not to discover the truth.
People really need to internalize this when it comes to their interactions with the police (and ultimately when it comes to their obligations as voters). After an investigation starts, the police's one and only job is to put someone in prison. Not to solve the case. Not to get to the truth. Not to promote some notion of justice. It's to get a conviction and that's it.
Choosing to talk to the police "because I have done nothing wrong" or "because I want to be cooperative" or "because I think they'll go easier on me if I do" are all terrible choices. When they are talking to you they have a single goal: To convict you.
> when they have no proof at all it's going to put a heavy burden on the prosecutor to get that person in jail.
Oh, how awful it is that a prosecutor has to prove someone's guilt! What next? Presumption of innocence?
Having followed the topic on and off for well over a decade: As a juror I never believe someone's confession. Rather irrelevant as most confessions won't get to trial, but it often takes very little to get a suspect to produce a false confession. At times, even without any deceit from the interrogators.
I wish I could recall one particular case: A person was murdered, and they charged another person living in the apartment complex. After a long interview session, he confessed. But his confession didn't match any of the evidence. So they pressured him to name an accomplice. The accomplice confessed. The evidence still didn't match. They kept pressuring the original suspect to name names until they had 4-5 people - all of whom confessed.
They later retracted their confessions, claiming duress. But the jurors convicted them on the strength of their confessions ("Who would confess to a murder? I wouldn't!").
They were, of course, all innocent. They spent time in prison, and eventually managed to get the courts to release them. But one or two still haven't been "exonerated" - their conviction stands and thus can't get jobs (or even an apartment).
Oh, and no physical coercion was involved. They were simply worn down by the long interrogation.
IIRC, over half of people whose convictions have been overturned involved a confession of guilt during interrogation (maybe it was just death row folks - don't remember the specifics).
You are conflating prosecution communications with interrogations. It is not legal for a police officer or detective to say what you quoted. It's akin to legal advice, which they do not do anymore if they are smart. This bill does not address the prosecution negotiation/communication.
> If it is illegal to say "We have all of the proof we need to convict you, you are going away for life, but if you confess we'll shorten your sentence" when they have no proof at all it's going to put a heavy burden on the prosecutor to get that person in jail.
That's not a realistic scenario. All actual evidence is disclosed as a matter of course in the justice process. Any bottom barrel attorney assures this, to whom the defendant has a right.
> An attorney sent by Ted’s wife was prohibited from entering the interrogation room by law enforcement, who told the attorney he would not be permitted in unless Ted specifically requested an attorney.
I'm not sure that "isn't fair". Its more like exploiting a technicality. But if it helps, I'd be for a provision that forced law enforcement to notify a subject when an attorney is offering to represent them at the time that it happens, and that they have the right to acccept that representation. Though, I wouldn't hold my breath given that he was already Miranda'd.
The cops may be doing something illegal, at which point the interrogation would be inadmissable. But that would validate that the system works. Remember that we are discussing lying and afforded protections against it. His attorney is an afforded protection, and he should have requested one.
That statement is factually untrue. Law enforcement regularly withholds evidence without any repercussion.
More importantly, the previous comment is referring to plea bargaining. Essentially, law enforcement is using the poor state of the current justice system to pressure people without resources into accepting a guilty verdict because the system is so stacked against them. Imagine:
"Yeah, you can try to prove your innocence, but we're going to hold you until your arraingment. That'll be at least a few weeks, which will mean you'll lose your job and your apartment and your car will be repo'd. And you'll probably lose anyway, because we've got all this evidence against you, and we promise its bulletproof. Or... You can take this deal we're offering. You plead guilty, and we'll let you walk out of here today."
False confessions are often secured without an attorney present. Many people are not good at demanding their attorney, and the cops aren't going to suggest it or offer it as an option to someone they're trying to sweat out.
>Many people are not good at demanding their attorney
It doesn't help that "not good" can include using a slightly slangy sentence ("laywer, dog") or sounding like you're asking permission or stating an opinion.
A confession may make other evidence easier to get at. If you suspect wrongdoing, but don't have probable cause to search the car/house, and the suspect says "oh yeah I've got a dead body in there", you're potentially about to be in posession of some serious new evidence you didn't have a right to get at previously.
These things happen before courts are involved. They are known as plea bargains. Unless you have a ton of money and a lawyer on call and are really smart, you would be made to believe it’s this short sentence or a very long sentence.
Many people without resources and support often falsely confess.
A high school friend of mine made the mistake of doing that because in the past he had cooperated with the arresting officer (i.e. snitched). However, what he didn't realize is that may have no bearing on what the officer might do but even more importantly, it's the prosecutor who decides if he's going to pursue the case and they did not care about his past history with that particular officer. The police are not your friends but more importantly they aren't the ones who do the prosecution. They interrogate and they have a job to do.
You can talk to the police during normal goings on just fine. They are not going to interrogate you just for asking for directions. It's during an investigation that you should lawyer up.
A friend was an LAPD detective for 30 something years. Now retired. Extremely nice person.
He emphatically told me I should never, ever, ever talk to the Police. Even if I witness a hit and run and just happen to be standing there and they walk over to me. Any one of 10,000 scenarios where the Police ask me for something, or want me to give information about something (even if I wasn't there).
They are actively searching for someone to blame, and if you happen to say the wrong words while trying your utmost to be helpful, they'll happily pin it on you.
That example is pretty bunk. I've literally been that person talking to the police after a traffic accident dozens of times. They have never asked for an ID, 90% of the time they don't even ask for your name, and maybe 50% of the time they ask for a phone number (they have never called back).
There are absolutely police officers who are lazy or will power trip or love busting perps. But each officer is not starting dozens of investigations every day. Especially the beat cops you are most likely to run into.
I think the deal is that it only takes once to ruin your life. The chances are low, but if you win the lottery the risk is personally devastating. if they try to pin a felony on you and even if it all comes up as bunkem, you'll forever be on the internet as someone charged with a felony without a conviction, the same will come up in your criminal background search.
How are they going to pin something on me if they don't even get my name or address?
People are conflating two things in this thread - "talking with the police" (aka voluntarily consenting with questioning) and literally just having a conversation with a police officer.
If you have a moral directive to slight the police, I can understand. But just asking for directions or telling them what you saw is not going to increase your chances of having a felony pinned on you more than showing up in random security footage.
Dozens might be an exaggeration, but at least a dozen. I had a job that required me to drive a lot in urban environments, and I regularly pulled over for good Samaritan stops.
I also briefly worked at a motel in the middle of nowhere and you better believe that regular conversations with police officers is a critical aspect of the job.
Experience with law enforcement is 100% affected by the biases the officer you are talking to suffers from.
If you're the middle class, middle American, nicely dressed, and got that harmless look. Well, expect things to go pretty well. Business owners of non-sus businesses generally have it pretty good too.
Are you a minority? Not dressed well? A youth? Well, things can go sideways for you quick.
> in a way that can't be meaningfully predicted. The stakes are incredibly high, too.
If we're talking about giving people advice for the police, I don't think people are going to need help with "Oh, you're being stabbed as we speak, should you call 911?" That's not the question people need help with. You're not boosting anyone's judgment here by leading with that argument.
However, if police want to ask what you're doing on your property in a friendly way, should you respond or should you say that you want to contact your lawyer? Or if you feel like striking up a conversation with the police to develop warmth, should you?
The right answer might come down to whether you're black, Native American, Asian, man, woman, etc., but without knowing more, don't talk to police is solid advice which has developed through a long relationship between citizenry and police. Even if you're just a witness, it would be naive to think you have nothing to fear. Even when you are the person who needs help, it would be naive to think you have nothing to fear.
If the police of America want to turn around their reputation, that's totally on them. The ball is in their court.
This is how you persuade citizens to accept widespread surveillance.
If people know that if they get hit by a car or robbed or something like that none of the witness will talk to the police they are going to be way more inclined to support more surveillance.
Ok, so you know society breaks down at the limit of what you are saying, right?
Also the example is ludicrous, you're saying the cops would try to blame someone for a hit and run that isn't even in a car. No, the cops are not that cartoonishly bad. Some cops in some departments may be, and I can almost guess the cities, but the average cop is not a monster, they're just some person like you or me.
> the average cop is not a monster, they're just some person like you or me.
The average person like you or me who becomes a cop gets chased out of the profession because they wouldn't turn a blind eye to the crimes their fellow officers commit against the public. Everyone left is most likely either just as guilty or complicit and enabling.
"Chased out" is the mildest version, even. There was a case of police whistleblower who ended up with no backup each time they were responding to a dangerous call, for example. Or that guy in NYC who was forcibly institutionalized by his fellow cops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Schoolcraft
I would say you should pay attention to who you're talking to. Some cops are that cartoonishly bad. My wife worked retail at TMobile and had cops come into the store at times trying to get information about customers. Most of them would accept the corporate policy and go talk to legal about the information they needed. One police officer started having a meltdown, sweating profusely, got visibly angry, and made her present her ID whereupon he wrote down her driver's license number, address, full legal name, etc.. She spent the next month or so dreading what he was going to do in retaliation. All because she redirected him to their legal department for information about a customer.
It sure does. So we better make it so that cops behave in ways that actually make people trust them, and fast. Anecdotally, I feel that most people my age or younger already treat the law in general, and law enforcement in particular, as some kind of mostly destructive force of nature that you do your best to stay out of the way of.
It doesn't help that whenever police organize in any capacity, denying and covering up abuses always seems one of the goal. Just look at what FOP says every time there's a police shooting.
Yes - society breaks down when cops act dishonestly and people stop trusting them. That is a good reason to fire the dishonest cops and hire honest ones, but in the current climate, that can't happen.
There needs to be prosecution and not just firing. When an engineer lies in a legal setting and consequently gets someone put into jail for years, should they merely be fired?
they won't blame you for the hit and run, but what if a store near there gets robbed an hour after you talk to them, and they decide you're a suspect because you look somewhat like the description and they know you were in the area?
I think you're stretching to make your point here.
You can construct many "what ifs", but they mainly apply if the police are actively subverting the normal rules of law or incompetent.
There are a subset of cops who are corrupt, or racist, or classist, where merely interacting with the police can lead to serious outcomes, but that's sort of a different problem that has to be addressed more systematically.
> You can construct many "what ifs", but they mainly apply if the police are actively subverting the normal rules of law or incompetent.
Cops in the US barely receive training - the average length is 22 weeks, while Germany clocks in at 2.5 years [1]. Of course a lot of police will be incompetent in the first place given the length and priorities of these trainings, made worse by cargo-culting from "senior" officers and by "killology" training [2].
> There are a subset of cops who are corrupt, or racist, or classist, where merely interacting with the police can lead to serious outcomes, but that's sort of a different problem that has to be addressed more systematically.
The fundamental problem is that you don't know whether the police officer you are talking to is good or not, and if you find out, it is too late.
Talking to a police officer is like petting someone else's dog. Don't do so unless you've talked to someone who feeds it first.
there are a multitude of legitimate reasons to talk to police without a lawyer. e.g. you are a victim, you are helping a victim, you are being friendly.
The real advice is not to try to talk your way out of a crime because it rarely works.
If you call them for a break in you 100% are a suspect. They suspect you're up to something. They might even find evidence of another crime while they are investigating the break in.
in several of these situations you may become a suspect by talking to the police. Plenty of instances of people being killed or injured by the police also begin with them calling the police for help.
The huge problem with cops in US is the prevalence and popularity of Dave Grossman's theories about "sheep", "wolves", and "sheepdogs". Some PDs pay big sums of money to have all their officers attend a "killology" training. Look that up and judge for yourself as to what it trains them to do.
Yes it negates any (negligible) utility you might hypothetically get from them.
Here's a different example:
Police have a policy of shooting aggressive dogs, under basically any circumstances. So if you have a pet that is slightly protective of their territory, then any situation that brings the cops within shooting range of you pet can get your pet killed.
I've wired electrical outlets without turning off the breaker, and I'm still here to type this. I would not, however, advise others to do so but rather emphasize the importance of turning off the breaker before doing electrical work.
Other than "nice day, eh?" or "No, as a matter of fact I do NOT know why you pulled me over", don't talk to cops without a lawyer.
In my experience they will phrase it as “Do you know how fast you were going?” or “Do you know what the speed limit is?”, worded in such a way that ANY answer is incriminating.
Can you explain what happens if you answer those? Does that affect the outcome?
Is a cop that pulls you over for what looks like a traffic violation trying to get you to make an incriminating statement (I have no idea, I'm just asking. No agenda)?
In the few situations where I was pulled over for speeding, I asked the cop to show me the reading and also whether the device was calibrated in the past few years, and they've always obliged (after answering "I know how fast I was going" and "I think the speed limit is...". If they have a calibrated device and they show me the reading, I'm not really sure how my answers to those questions affects the decision tree.
What you want to do is avoid creating an unnecessary confrontation by acting adversarial.
This might not be as significant as you think. My understanding is that many models allow them to set that number directly. If I recall correctly, the source for this was "A Speeder's Guide to Avoiding Tickets", written by a former state trooper.
I don't know if it's factually accurate, but the advice in that book has generally been solid.
I don't know if that's accurate either. In any case, his reading corresponded the speed I was going (within the margin of error for a speedometer, which can be large), and it was calibrated, so I signed the citation and paid the fine.
Again, if cops are actually going around setting values to get citations, there are larger systemic problems. Also, many vehicles have GPS and other datalogging showing actual speeds, so if the cop is faking the numbers, that's going to start showing up in court.
answering that you know how fast you were going, combined with data suggesting you were speeding yields the conclusion that you were intentionally breaking the law.
Yes, and? Sorry to be obtuse, but I'm just trying to understand the decision tree here. Of course if I'm speeding I know I'm breaking the law. Does denying that somehow get me out of a ticket?
Look at the base rate of speeding. When I drive on 101 in the bay area in clear traffic, I'm doing around 65 (the limit)-75 in the right lane and the majority of people are passing me on the left (or tailgating me because they want me to go faster or drafting or whatever it is that causes people to drive too close behind me when I drive near the speed limit). From what I can tell, unless a cop is actively trying to be punitive, they typically don't stop a car simply because it's going up to about 15MPH over the freeway limit.
I have personally successfully argued in front of a traffic court judge that I could not be aware of the speed limit since the sign was obscured, and it resulted in not having to pay the ticket. I am sure I would not have been successful if I admitted guilt in front of the officer who pulled me over, or participated in his various gotcha games.
Did the cop show up to your court date? Did they provide any information to the judge? Did you truly not know the speed of the road you were on, and was that because the sign was obstructed, or is that the argument you made in court?
It seems like in this situation I could have honestly answered "no, I did not know the speed limit".
I mean, where I said I'd know the speed limit above, if it was truly obscured, I think I would be playing it safe and judge things on what the road looked like, whether there was a school there, and the weather and other ambient conditions.
Yea, the cop showed up, presented his evidence, I argued that absent a posted limit I was following the state's default limit for that type of road, and brought a photograph of the nearest speed limit sign obscured by a tree branch as evidence that I could not have known the posted (lower) limit. Judge found it convincing. I noticed that the branch was trimmed two weeks later.
I did not answer any of the officer's questions during the stop, but did identify myself and hand him all the documents he requested. I figured I wasn't going to avoid the ticket using my mouth, so I saved it for the judge.
OK, fair enough. You acted in good faith during the court date and chose not to answer questions or get adversarial with the cop during the stop. And you were technically correct, with evidence, which is best kind of correct.
How did you proceed past the initial questions, IE how did you refuse to answer in a polite way (I'm curious because there is a whole genre of youtube videos of cops stopping people and the driver getting in an adversarial situation by refusing to talk).
Also, just out of curiosity, what was the default limit for that type of road, and what was the posted speed limit? Are we talking "driving 35 in a 25 zone". Any other contextual information, like weather conditions, nearby school, recently changed limit, etc? The cops that park at the school near me usually don't stop people unless they are driving 45+ in our 25 zone.
I just ignored his question and immediately handed him the documents he required without any resistance. I didn't talk back or question him or even remotely cop an attitude. I'm sure I got lucky that the cop didn't feel like pressing further with his gotcha script. I am white which probably helped immensely too. Unfortunately that still matters--I can acknowledge my privilege.
I watch a lot of those YouTube traffic stop videos (they are addicting), and a lot of suspects in these videos talk themselves into (or attitude themselves into) an arrest. Not to mention incriminating themselves. You know the ones who don't make it onto YouTube? The ones who shut the fuck up and probably end up much better off.
If that traffic stop leads to the cop finding something else in your car, and that leads to a crime, a simple question can make the difference between a legal or an illegal stop in a court of law. Since the best case scenario in a traffic stop is "don't get a ticket" and the worst case is "Be confined to a concrete cell with a serious criminal conviction for the rest of your life" I don't answer any questions whatsoever, no matter how trivial. Happens to innocent people all the time.
Getting a $200 ticket you could have otherwise "talked your way out of" is a small price to pay to vs. the risk.
How sure are you that you know the speed limit and how fast you were going? Your speedometer likely read a different value than the police officer's radar. If you tell them you were going faster than they measured you at, which value do you think is getting written down? Also, even though you were speeding and were pulled over, that doesn't guarantee that you actually got radared. It's entirely possible that you were pulled over for something completely different, but by answering that question, you have just admitted to something else.
I can't be sure of the speed limit and how fast I am going, but having lived in this area I can typically tell the speed limit of any road. Highways are 65MPH, and streets are typically 15 (alley), 25 (residential streets with parking and school areas). In California, speed limits are not required to be posted in some situations, "prima facie", and knowing the mapping from road characteristic to speed limit is required to get a permit.
For how fast I'm going, I'm usually checking my speed every 30 seconds or so, but can also tell how fast I'm going simply by looking, how hard I'm pressing the pedal (my car is in "Eco" mode, which means it's pretty pokey all around).
I never drive more than about 15 miles above the speed limit (and then, only on a freeway where folks are driving fast enough that I don't feel safe driving slower, because people frequently come right up behind me and change lanes at the last second if I drive the speed limit on California highways). So I am not particularly worried about the cases you're describing (speeding like that is a misdemeanor, not a felony). I used to drive faster, but over time I concluded that driving slower has a wide range of benefits, both in accidents, as well as fuel consumption. It's not like driving 10MPH faster on the freeway is going to make a huge difference in your arrival time.
I see a lot of armchair lawyers on places like Hacker News who confabulate all sorts of scenarios to justify their adversarial relationship with the police, other folks who assume all cops are racist/classist/whateverist, and other folks who just don't want to follow laws because they don't like authority. I really don't know what to say to folks like that. Collect telemetry and bring it to court, and good luck with that!
So the last time I talked to a cop was last week, when one knocked on my door. My neighbor's car was stolen overnight, and the officer wanted to know if my security camera was recording and if anything was captured during a certain time frame.
Are you telling me that I should have shut the door in his face, and called my lawyer?
You can also drive without a seat belt several times and likely be ok. It only takes one time to be proven wrong, however, and by then, it may be too late to learn the lesson.
Despite my knee-jerk reaction to assume any policy changes coming out of Seattle are self-destructive; this seems very reasonable especially if there's precedent in other countries [1].
> SEATTLE — A Seattle police officer who unnecessarily used a ruse to locate a hit-and-run suspect in May 2018 has been suspended for six days after a watchdog agency found that the lie caused the man to take his own life.
> The unnamed officer sent word to the man through a friend -- the complainant in the case -- that a woman injured in the crash was in critical condition and might not survive her injuries.
> In reality, the crash was a minor fender bender and no one was injured, according to the Office of Police Accountability, an independent investigative office within the Seattle Police Department. Andrew Myerberg, the civilian director of the watchdog, authored the November report on the findings.
> The driver, who friends said “was despondent about the fact that he may have killed someone,” died by suicide less than a week later.
> “Notably, the night before he took his own life, he directly told his roommate that the incident was causing him to feel suicidal feelings,” the OPA report stated.
Seattle PD is also notoriously not well behaved even by police standards.
Gotta be careful negligently and irresponsibly toying with peoples lives in a city that gets so few sunshine hours. Six days of suspension is laughable.
> Seattle police union rank-and-file leaders are under investigation after an officer was recorded on his body camera appearing to make light of the death of a woman who was killed by another officer this year, saying that she “had limited value.”
> Auderer left his body camera on after responding to the South Lake Union neighborhood, where a marked patrol vehicle driven by another officer struck and killed Jaahnavi Kandula on Jan. 23. That officer had been responding to a “priority one call,” police said a day after the incident, when he hit Kandula, 23, who had been in a crosswalk.
> In the brief clip, Auderer, who is vice president of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, is driving and can be heard discussing details of the incident in a call with the guild’s president, Mike Solan.
> Auderer said that the officer whose vehicle struck Kandula had been “going 50” and that “that’s not out of control.” According to a police investigation report that was referred to prosecutors for review last month, the officer had been driving at 74 mph and Kandula was thrown more than 100 feet.
> “That’s not reckless for a trained driver,” Auderer also said in the video, adding that he doesn’t believe “she was thrown 40 feet either.”
> “But she is dead,” he said. He later laughs and says, “No, it’s a regular person.” Only Auderer’s statements are audible in the video.
> "Yeah, just write a check," he also said and laughed again. “Eleven thousand dollars. She was 26 anyway,” Auderer said, misstating Kandula’s age. “She had limited value.”
Could this be a natural result of the cultural shift away from viewing police work being honorable and decent like it was after 9/11? Seems like recent events could have applied selection pressure to make only those who could care less about honor or decency willing to stay in the profession. Sad all around. If a civil servant talks this way about a 23 year old grad student being killed in a fashion that would put an average citizen immediately under the jail, it's probably wood chipper time for them. What a disgrace.
Seattle PD has been under a federal consent decree since 2012 due to bad behavior, so this long precedes any of the recent "anti-police" hullabaloo. https://seattlepolicemonitor.org/overview
2012 is far past the pro police glory days that I think started to end firmly around 2008 with Occupy Wallstreet and Occupy Seattle but I get your general point
I have interacted with some Seattle PD cops in an environment where they assumed that the entirety of their audience is very sympathetic to them (a lecture on how to properly interact with police when carrying openly or concealed, delivered to a group that can be reasonably described as "right-wing militia").
Some of the most racist things I've heard in my life was from the officers delivering that lecture. And most of it wasn't even brought up deliberately - they were just telling anecdotes from their day to day work and the kinds of stories that they trade with colleagues. It goes beyond racist, too - one of them literally said that people in the neighborhood he has to work in are "all filthy disgusting animals".
Good. These kinds of measures are necessary for the restoration of the balance of power in the justice system between prosecution and defense. it should (at the very minimum) be 50-50 every time, then hinge on the facts/evidence to push either over the edge. thats the only way an adversarial system works. But we are very very very far from that at the moment, with a 98% plea bargain rate (https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...). This bypasses nearly every single baked in advantage that the defense has, with most existing at the trial stages. Lots of ways to balance those scales, this is a good measure in my opinion.
What we have at the moment its a system backsliding towards something that looks similar to post-soviet law like the current Russian system. Its not a good look, even if we probably still have a legal system in the top 10 least fucked.
The 98% plea bargain rate isn't quite as bad as it seems, though; prosecutors drop marginal (i.e. your 50/50) cases entirely so they can brag about their high conviction rates when it comes time for reelection.
I can think of a very small handful of cases where the prosecution drop marginal cases. I've seen cases where there is zero evidence be taken all the way to the day of trial in order to try and get a plea. I see a great number of cases dropped on day of trial when the defendant won't plead out.
Source: 11 years experience in the criminal justice system.
Incredibly localized and subject to personal biases/ambitions for the prosecution. So sometimes you will see a huge majority of cases under certain categories dropped to boost their numbers (or because it makes sense, like the generally unlawful arrests during the George Floyd protests) and sometimes you will see an insane stacking of cases that will never win in order to boost other numbers and project a 'tough on crime' persona. See: Horrible Dickhead-Sheriff Joe Arpaio (sheriffs in many places have large overlap with prosecutors' duties)
Except that a lot of that statistic is driven by the fact that you will be hit with much harder sentencing if you choose to defend yourself in court rather than immediately agreeing to a plea deal and having the level lowered (for federal cases.) This is known as the "trial penalty."
I can answer this with some authority. I just did 10 years in pretrial and looked through the cases of thousands of people in detail.
I would say 95% of people who are indicted are guilty of something related to the indictment. Often not exactly what is in the indictment (overcharging is rife), but guilty of something. What we need to do is charge people more accurately. Overcharging is used to elicit guilty pleas on lesser charges.
Being guilty of "Something" in the indictment is also a far cry from being guilty of the indictment. For instance, the difference between possession and distribution.
This is one of the biggest ones. If you are caught with more than a certain amount (say 20 teeny tiny bags of crack) you are assumed to be distributing it even without any evidence of distribution. They say you would not have that much for personal use.
I was on a jury last month for a case with this exact scenario. Dude had a lot of weed and the prosecution tried to use the quantity as the sole proof that he was distributing. Searched his phone, nothing, asked the neighbors about suspicious comings and goings, nothing, et cetera. Then they had some detective expert witness come in and say that in his opinion, the guy was absolutely a dealer based on that alone.
The jury decided pretty much immediately that the prosecution hadn't proved shit. But a different jury... who knows?
This guy was a brave soul taking it to trial. Normally the jury believes expert cop witnesses. This is how they get the plea deals :(
I know people who bulk buy large quantities of weed because they have to travel out of state to get it and they want to minimize the risks of being caught with it all in transit.
Most people never get indicted for a crime. Maybe the system should seek out the truth of what guilt can actually be proved instead of just trying to lower the conviction rate to 50% arbitrarily.
Currently, the prosecution wins the majority of cases because they can get a plea bargain regardless of guilt. I agree with you that this is wrong.
But, to me, the prosecution shouldn't take on cases where they don't have good evidence and they should drop cases if it becomes clear they are wrong. If prosecutors did this they'd still have a very high win rate.
Exactly. There is nothing in the records that prosecutors keep and make available to the public to indicate that. It is trivial to verify this by looking through the meticulous and publicly searchable database of dropped charges and arrest voidings.
The concept IIUC is both sides have zealous advocacy - both sides leave no stone unturned, no argument unmade (generally speaking) - and through the court procedure, that's how a fair trial and the truth come out.
How else do you propose doing it? A system - in sometimes highly distrusting, dangerous, and angry situations - that relies on good will seems unlikely to work. Advocacy accepts the adversarial nature of the issue.
Countries do have different systems. France relies more on judges somehow, but I don't know if the accused gets an advocate.
>The concept IIUC is both sides have zealous advocacy - both sides leave no stone unturned, no argument unmade (generally speaking) - and through the court procedure, that's how a fair trial and the truth come out.
It seems to me we land a long way from this idea. In reality what happens, especially for poor people, is the prosecution has, in relation to the defense, a virtually unlimited budget and leaves no stone unturned. The defense is often a public defender without the time or resources to turn many stones at all and is viewed by our population as sleazy because they simply try to do their jobs.
Right to counsel is pretty universal. The main difference between adversarial (US) and inquisitorial systems is that in the latter, the judge is not limited to evidence that either side introduces, but can initiate their own investigation to the extent necessary to determine the truth. This makes it much harder for prosecution to pull tricks such as concealing relevant evidence or cherry-picking experts. It also means that even if the defendant doesn't have a good lawyer, the judge can effectively compensate for that.
Except that at the point where there is a police interrogation, there is (or should be) probable cause to believe that the person in question is not a law-abiding citizen.
While imperfect, adversarial systems are still our best means of establishing the truth. Whether it is Quality Assurance testing in the context of engineering, reproducibility in the context of scientific experiments, or trial courts in the context of law.
Oh...I think you hit the nail on the head as square as can be. We are in a Soviet law system now. I have proof of it which I will make public in the near future.
Maybe we should make confessions illegal unless done in front of a judge (with prosecution and defense attorneys present. The judge can advise the suspect of their rights and ask if they've been promised leniency or any other accommodation, etc.
And maybe all evidence from interrogations should be inadmissible unless video recorded beginning-to-end with no interruptions.
Then everyone could see if the suspect was browbeaten into a confession or if statements were taken out of context.
They tried that in Chicago. They never prosecuted anyone. So they dismiss the unit and create a new one under a new name. This goes on every few years.
"When New York police officers temporarily reduced their 'proactive policing' efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics."
"'In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,' the researchers wrote. 'The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.'"
As it happens, Washington put some reasonable-sounding rules in place after the 2020 protests (https://crosscut.com/politics/2021/07/what-new-wa-police-acc...), and our police reacted in the same way yours did: they do nothing. Or as little as possible. So since they already do nothing, we might as well get the laws tightened up.
I feel like I don't know enough about interrogations to form an opinion on this. All I know comes from TV and movies. It feels like it's either obviously a good idea, or obviously a bad idea, but I honestly don't know which one.
I don't recall which program it was, but likely something on Netflix like "making a murderer" or similar. There was interrogation video of cops berating a mentally challenged teenager into admitting guilt. It was truly disgusting. Watch a couple minutes of that, and it'd be hard to not form an opinion on cops lying.
While I haven't read the actual wording of the proposed bill, in general, addressing this is a very good idea. There are simply too many examples of police manipulation of vulnerable people during questioning. In fact, the police routinely get trained on how to manipulate and coerce people during questioning because they consider it so "effective" (from the perspective of their metrics).
The odd thing is that most often it's not even necessary. Thanks to TV shows, movies, books and a handful of rare cases which get featured in the media, people assume a significant number of police questionings are like some cagey chess match with a criminal mastermind. In reality the vast majority of criminal suspects brought in for questioning are caught red-handed or with strong evidence of guilt. Because of this most convictions are plea bargains and the few convicted at trial are not close judgements. If we strengthen these protections, IMHO, it will change the conviction rates very, very little.
As a quick reminder, in most police departments, because of their Union Agreements, Police officers cannot be questioned unless they have their lawyer present (they HAVE to be present), and a union rep, and have to be shown ALL video evidence that has been collected before they can make a statement.
Nice to see the good ol rules for me, not for thee still exists..
It should also be illegal to lie to students about history. So much of what is taught now is "reinterpreted" from what actually happened. A history book about what happened in the past is more likely to be accurate the closer it is to the actual events.
Fine as long as 18 U.S.C. § 1001 becomes the law of the land for all interactions with police (felony punishable by 5 years imprisonment for making a false statement).
The moment a police officer breaks the law, he's a "criminal". The moment you have that third beer and drive home a bit sooner than you should, you're a "criminal".
Perhaps we should get away from using "criminal" as a dehumanizing term like it's a career path, like it's an us vs them. There are indeed "career criminals", but the majority of people who have ever broken the law have the same sets of motivation and desires and choices as those who haven't.
This is a bad reply that seeks to compare all cops, of which very few are arrest-level criminals as a percentage, to the level of the hardcore criminals that they exist to police.
The answer makes no sense in the context of the statement to which I am replying nor in the context of my reply.
Its a trollish answer that is seeking to argue for the sake of arguing, because we can't allow that law enforcement are are preferrable to criminals. The extremists on this forum are something else.
I didn't asky you for a pedantic debate on parsing criminal value. I won't join you in not seeing it as "us vs them" because you are choosing to blend low level and high level crime into a single category. Yes, the guy who was arrested for drunk-in-public isn't "them". Yes, the person who was arrested for street robbery is "them", and who almost always has a long rap sheet. Your last phrase is indecipherable.
"but the majority of people who have ever broken the law have the same sets of motivation and desires and choices as those who haven't. "
So what? What is your point here? If you break the law, you are a criminal, because that's the definition, someone that broke the law. It's not dehumanizing, it's just saying "a person that was convicted of breaking the law". Good lord, any type of statement, even about eye color, technically comes out as "us vs them". So you're point is shallow and pedantic.
Revisit the original comment, saying that "criminals" are worse than cops. Surely someone who drives 61 in a 55 isn't worse than the type of cops being discussed, even though that person, by definition, is a "criminal". Even a comparison of cops and criminals is odd, since by definition, any cop can be a criminal by violating the law.
The only reasonable explanation is the overloading of the word to mean something more.
When you start judging the entire group of "criminals" is when the problems start. It does make it sound like a career path, rather than a thing that happened one time.
I would also assert that it's in fact _worse_ to be employed to protect and serve and instead do...whatever they claim they're doing...I have no expectation any random person on the street will be safe or lawful. I pay the salaries of police in exchange for the expectation that they'll be safe and lawful. And yet, they sure aren't.
So nope, I would definitely say cops are worse than criminals in this regard.
You're actually just lumping all police into a single category of "abusers". It's similar to lumping people by their ethnicity or their religion and at its core is prejudiced. Some people love saying "All cops are bad", but that sort of rhetoric is a lie and alienates the good cops, do which exist, and whose help you ought to be enlisting.
Also, calling people bad names isn't something to be proud of. Society isn't better for you doing so.
Ah yes, if you don't read my posts I can certainly see how you might not understand my position. When you're ready, it's all still there. Until then I'll skip the rest of this interaction. Enjoy!
Your foundational premise is that good cops don’t exist because they’re part of a system. It’s an awful convenient argument because it lacks refutability.
Are you a butcher because you eat meat? Are you a zionist because your tax dollars fun Isreal? Do you steal documents from poor workers because you buy the products they make?
You are part of many systems. So are police officers. They are not any more at fault for the injustices of law enforcement as you are for living the way you do.
I'm not apologizing for abuses of power, I want police accountability.
What are you doing to actually improve these corrupt systems? Calling people names is not bringing the world closer to justice. I think it does the opposite, which is why I continue to debate you.
> What are you doing to actually improve these corrupt systems?
Isn't it amusing how you have absolutely no idea what I've done, and yet you've made up some narrative that I'm not doing anything? Isn't it also funny how you think I should owe you some reasoning behind why I communicate about people in power the way I do? Why does one have to justify criticism of people in power?
I've protested. I've been tear gassed. I vote, I picket, I contribute funds. So I also feel well within my rights to talk some shit. And I also feel very comfortable telling random nobodys on the internet that suggest that I shouldn't "say mean things" about a group of people that have said and done incredibly "mean" (illegal, offensive, dystopian) things to me to buzz off.
I'm also noticing you ignored my nazi comment. So again I'll ask, you're saying there are good nazis, yes?
If you have done all that and all you have to say is "police are scum", you've learned the wrong lessons. Police are here to stay. I don't like how they can skirt the laws but calling them scum isn't fixing the issue. Negativity is unattractive. Moderates will be put off by your hate.
Don't bring up nazis online, it's such a tired argument that people straight up ignore it.
You appear to be an activist but you have no recommendations of what changes in policy ought to happen. There are so many protesters in my city like that. They're disruptive and offer no solutions. That's not progress, it's laziness.
> If you have done all that and all you have to say is "police are scum", you've learned the wrong lessons
Again, duly noted that a person on the opposite side of a debate doesn't agree with me.
> Moderates will be put off by your hate.
Shockingly enough, I'm uninterested in pandering to apologists :)
> Don't bring up nazis online, it's such a tired argument that people straight up ignore it.
But I thought it was possible to be a part of a hate group and also not be complicit in that group's abuse? Stand by your position or don't, not my problem. But you're being inconsistent.
> You appear to be an activist but you have no recommendations of what changes in policy ought to happen.
I'm sorry, where was this question ever posed? Or is this more you assuming I should've spelled out my entire life story?
> That's not progress, it's laziness.
Unsure that a person doing nothing other than poo-pooing other people can cast the laziness stone.
Purjury is supposed to be serious. But it's not enforced against police officers. Other misconduct like prosecutors hiding exculpatory evidence is also rarely if ever punished even when blatently proven and widely publicided.
So why should I believe, if this law passes, anybody in the justice system will enforce it?
What happened to Ted Bradford is awful. The fact he actually eventually was exenorated was like winning the lottery. For most falsely convicted, a statistical impossibility.