A G O N Y

Interesting discussion of the fifth amendment and the use of police information against defendants in the court system by James Duane, Professor at the Regent Law school in Virginia and former criminal defender.

Duane is a wildly hyper speaker, and this is pretty long (27 minutes). But it's chock full of concrete examples and some real eye-openers of criminal law.

Google video here

If you want the really short version without seeing the explanations (which I don't recommend, the examples given are stunning): Nothing you say to the police, even if you are completely innocent and telling nothing but the absolute truth, will ever be used to HELP you in court. Ever.

i dont need a fancy professor to tell me!

Great info, thanks for posting.

If you have any doubts, I'd urge you to heed Justice Robert Jackson's advice: "Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances". Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 59 (1949). In other words, don't EVER talk to the police if you are a suspect in a criminal investigation.

Frankly there's no reason to challenge advice from one of the finest prosecutors in modern jurisprudence. Justice Jackson, to my knowledge, is the only Supreme Court Justice who has ever recused himself from the court to actually try a case. In fact, FDR himself asked him to serve as the chief US prosecutor at the Nuremburg trials. Why...because Justice Jackson is one of the greatest trial lawyers to have EVER lived, and the United States couldn't risk allowing the Nazis to escape accountability for their actions in WWII. Quite literally Justice Jackson was asked to defend all that was right and true in the world from all of the evil and horror the Nazis represented. To his credit, Justice Jackson's closing argument at Nuremburg is considered one of the finest of all time (right up there with John Adams' at the Boston Massacre and Clarance Darrow's in his own defense).

So if someone of his caliber tells you not to make any statement to the police... for your own good just zip it.

We need a Justice Jackson right now in this country.

Good video, there is a follow up from a police officer at the same lecture who backs up pretty much everything this guy says.

part 2 is great as well

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4467&hl=en

What strikes me about it is how thin and limited our rights are even here in this country. And although it's taken a huge beating lately, we still have one of the most liberal legal systems in the world.

You start with a presumption of innocence and a handful of very simple laws that protect you, and from there you have an entire giant organization (the criminal prosecution and police) who work non stop to overcome those protections.

-remagi

If you found this video eye-opening, I suggest you read a bit more about the exceptions to the warrant requirements of the 4th and 14th amendments. Even prosecutors will admit that some of the things police are allowed to do reach a very questionable level. Unfortunately nobody wants to look soft on crime or criminals (namely legislators and the conservative dominated Supreme Court), so our civil liberties erode, more people get locked up, we spend exorbitant amounts of money to incarcerate them in a system with horrendous recidivism rates, and we do this all while underfunding the educational system that could have helped avoid the problems in the first place. I digress...

One of the other things most people don't know about is the erosion of the exclusionary rule. Without getting too serious here with citations, the exclusionary rule is the mechanism the US Supreme Court has chosen to use to ensure the police won't violate citizens' 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights. Its main functions as originally conceived were to 1) deter police from collecting evidence in violation of the Constitution (under the theory that because a police officer's main motivator is the eventual conviction of a suspect he or she will want to avoid having evidence excluded), and 2) to ensure judicial integrity by not allowing the use of unconstitutionally gathered evidence.

In subsequent cases, the Court has narrowed the exclusionary rule by now only applying it in situations that will deter the police. This means that if exclusion won't deter the police, you CAN be convicted of a crime in a US court of law even if the evidence used to convict you was collected in violation of your Constitutional rights. Make of that what you will...