You see it all the time with wrongful convictions and people signing confessions to crimes they didn't commit. I often wonder in these cases, do the officers, does law enforcement in this case really care who did it? If you bring someone in and interrogate them for 12+ hours and eventually they give you the answer you want to hear, do they never stop and ask themselves if the reason the person gave that answer is simply to make whatever they were doing stop?
It seems like some of these investigations the point isn't to solve the crime, but to dot the I's and cross your T's. It seems like actual public safety is an afterthought as long as you "catch the criminal" on paper.
It's slightly less disturbing to think that the cops legitimately think they're doing a good job over the alternative of intentionally ignoring their responsibility. Still troubling to think they could be that deluded.
That’s the key factor that outsiders looking into the criminal justice system overlook. They think it’s easy. “Just stop being racist, corrupt, etc.” It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being. Reforming the system is important, but it’s much harder than people think.
This is categorically not true. Police have to deal with some very problematic people, sure. But bad days are far more common that bad people, and most interactions aren't even that.
Every police force has its share of assholes too, who are net cause of more problems than they solve. The most effective ones I've known have been aware of the systemic problems of thinking like you suggest, and intentionally work against it.
But randomly pick out some sentencing hearings one day at your local federal court. They’ll go over the rap sheet of people who actually go to prison. It’s eye opening.
You can even see this in the criminal justice advocacy materials if you read carefully. I love the ACLU but if you read beyond the headline in many cases it’s quite revealing. I remember a case a few years ago where the headline was some “child” was imprisoned simply for being at a scene where a pizza delivery guy was murdered in broad daylight. Turns out he was actually in a gang, who murdered the guy in cold blood, and the legal theory is that the cops can’t prove which kid actually fired the shots. You can find the legal theory compelling (and I do) while acknowledging that this is the kind of shit that turns up even when social justice types are trying to pick impact cases.
Or heck George Floyd. I think the media overlooked a really important angle on this story that would have spoke to religious people. Floyd was a guy who spent most of his life being a pretty bad person: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-us-news-ap-top-new...
But he had found Jesus, he was turning his life around and reaching out to kids, and when Derek Chauvin murdered him he cut short what could have been a path to redemption. Reflexively saying “criminals don’t deserve to be murdered” when Floyd’s background comes up is a tautology. Sure. But does pretending that stuff never happened help you understand the real human story of Floyd, Chauvin, and the people in that community? Why making progress on criminal justice reform is so hard even as it’s extremely necessary? Is your phat dismissal and reduction of people to a demons and angels binary persuasive to anyone who doesn’t already agree with you?
It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point; lots of people make excuses for the excesses of these systems based on this sort of "98%" (or whatever big number) argument; mostly those excuses are pure fertilizer.
Good people don't rob their neighbors because they're "having a bad day." They're shitty people. And no, poverty doesn't excuse it. People in Bangladesh, where I'm from, are vastly poorer. If poverty caused crime, they'd go around stealing, joining gangs, etc. But mostly they don't. In Bangladeshi villages, crime is lower than in U.S. cities. And when they do those things, nobody hesitates to call them shitty people!
I'm extremely sympathetic to police reform, because I think even shitty people don't deserve to be abused by the state. But let's not mince words here.
> It also, as you note, precludes the majority of police work which was more my point
That may be your point, but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding. My point was in the context of this article, which is about someone who was prosecuted for brutally raping and murdering a woman.
> but I wasn't talking about pulling people over for speeding.
Neither was I. I was talking about the majority of all the work they do.
Everyone can identify clearly horrible behavior, and often it is police who have to deal with this as part of their job. This is difficult and unfortunate, but it is not the defining characteristic of the work. Pretending that it is in order to somehow excuse bad behavior on their part doesn't do anyone favors.
Fertilizer is good and useful (it helps plants grow); what you're talking is raw sewage, complete with draino and hastily-disposed medication.
If your job is to do image/video forensics on hard drives of people already arrested or served with warrants, it’s generally either unremarkable or traumatically upsetting. The latter is going to have the most impact on your perception, and would likely color your worldview on things like encryption or the overall goodness of humanity.
My comment was more aimed at general policing, the vast majority of which fits my characterization.
Due to the nature of the job, and the perks and impunity of it in the US, it actually self selects for assholes. The military does as well, to a much lesser extent. There were some days when I went to bed thinking, "everyone I talked to today was a self important asshole."
Nope, the attitude of "I never make mistakes" still baffles my mind. I get that most people they're dealing with are causing some amount of trouble, they should still regularly doubt their instincts. That would also go a long way to answering demands to "stop being racist."
>It’s a system where day in and day out, almost everyone you encounter is a really shitty human being.
If they hold that mindset, they should just extend it to themselves and the other people in the criminal justice system.
If the officers don't realize, upon bringing five separate people in on the same description, that at least four of them have to be the wrong guy, then they fail the test. If they end up eliminating four of the five but then concluding that the last guy actually did it, they also fail the test.
INSERT fake_actor() 5 TIMES SELECT suspects() CHECK officer_state_of_mind()
In the real world, as somebody already said, the logistics of hiring 5 actors to act "suspicious", get themselves arrested, set up plausible backstories that you would somehow have to keep from the police, potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong, etc?
I'm going to assume you're proposing this as a thought experiment and not something that could actually work.
[And I mean this in the nicest of ways, I construct these kinds of "solutions" constantly too]
> potentially expose them to bodily harm, the legal consequences if something go wrong
Presume that the FBI is staking out the police building and has (compelled) the cooperation of the local sheriff, in exactly the same way white-hat social-engineering pen-testers work in cooperation with the management of the organizations they attempt to penetrate. Presume also that, unknown to the police, no real suspects are being simultaneously processed (all have been redirected to other neighbouring precincts) and so all police suppression equipment has been swapped out for non-working versions. (If you try to taze or shoot the suspect, you lose.)
To be clear, this is a setup that already happens when there is an officer under FBI suspicion of being complicit/involved in criminal activity. The FBI comes in and works with the precinct to set up an internal sting. The only difference, here, is that this involves all the officers of the precinct, rather than just one.
I get the whole purpose of "yes, people are stopped every day because they resemble someone wanted", but this is "I am going to go out of my way to purposefully resemble and act like someone who the police will take a negative interest in".
Stalin truly believed what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR. It's extremely easy to justify bad deeds and fool yourself that the ends justify the means.
There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator, president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows best".
Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter how sure you are that there's stolen property in the building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter without a warrant.
Individual rights limit what others can do.
Imagine if each of your cells had individual rights or every bee in a hive has freedom to do its own thing.
Sometimes (most?) having centralized systems of power can be misused but that doesn't mean that centralized systems shouldn't be tried, there are evolutionary advantages to them.
How am I not surprised that you're the founder and CTO of a proctoring company that does facial recognition + AI to detect lying with "100% unbiased results". Fucking gross, man.
> Based on established models such as Big 5 and intrinsic values, TBI adds AI-powered Natural Language Processing to process data and help you make unbiased hiring decisions 100% of the time.
> TBI stack ranks candidates according to their performance in the assessment with regards to the competencies predetermined by the enterprise, ranging from 'essential' to 'good' and then 'critical'.
> Leverage psycholinguistics to analyze a candidate’s response and predict behavior in half the time.
So this company has layered AI on top of pseudoscience and is selling it as an automated hiring tool. I guess the hiring decisions are 100% unbiased if the results are indistinguishable from noise? Or maybe your hiring decisions are "unbiased" if you launder them through this software to produce a team that looks like your existing team?
Either way, this Talview company is doing some really evil stuff.
To be fair, that is actually true, although I don't think that's the (false) claim they're actually making.
A personal attack is not appropriate for this forum. I wouldn't have a made personal attack on you even if you had put what is you do in your profile.
FWIW I am proud of what I build, our products for half a decade have helped people to be able to take assesments from their home, whether it's disabilities or those cannot lose time on their jobs or would have to travel hundreds of miles just to an exam center to be certified. I am proud to have helped all of them.
There are plenty of discussions to be had on universities or certification bodies insisting on stringent requirements to do remote assesments to protect their integrity but a personal attack is not really the way to engage on this topic
Cells or bees have nothing to do with the wrongfully imprisoned minors in question.
Hitler as well.
I went to Catholic school. Had quite the debate with a nun over why I thought Hitler and Stalin both went to heaven, since both thought they were doing the right thing and were just horribly misguided.
I think a better way to phrase this would be that Stalin often said that what he was doing was for the greater good of the USSR.
Stalin remained true to the Marxist ideal of a classless and stateless world society until his death in 1953. This is the conclusion of researchers at Amsterdam University (UvA) who studied Stalin's annotations in books by Marx, Engels and Lenin in his private library.
The notes originate from the period between 1917 and 1953 and show that the dictator continued to adhere to such Marxist goals as the abolition of the state and the creation of classless society. Moreover, Stalin's correspondence and discussions with such Communist leaders as Mao Zedong and Palmiro Togliatti show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2000-02/NOfS-SwfM-22...
A false preacher using his power for selfish purposes will carry a bible for show, maybe have a few stowed away. A false preacher certainly wouldn't have accumulated years of theology literature in his personal/private library over his lifetime. Seems like a true believer to me, but you may see it differently. Him being a true believer and having done what he did makes his particular flavor of human nature even more frightening.
Still I'd think that primarily important thing for him was himself and personal power, and that if he had had to make a choice between ideologies and himself, he'd done what was better for him personally. I wonder if he looked at communism etc more like a powerful tool (or so he thought) for him to use, and then not surprising if he spent time studying it
From the article:
> show a continuing faith in the spread of communism and "world revolution".
That'd almost made him the dictator over the world? Who knows if that might have been a main goal, and communism a tool?
During an appeal to the 7th (iirc) District Court, the ADA's argument always came down to "What about Justice for the victim'a family?" like somehow it isn't even relevant anymore if they have the wrong guy or not - if they decided that the recently convicted was wrongfully convicted, it would be unfair to the victim's family to let him go, even if he isn't guilty.
If they're going through the effort of asking you questions in a controlled setting it's because they're trying to make sure anything they get is 100% unambiguously admissible in court.
Law enforcement is an organization and all the baggage that usually comes with organizations still applies (eg maintaining the organization is a priority). LEOs are people that want to do people things - it's a job, not a way of life.
I liken it as a game which didn't take hackers into account when designing the system, and the hackers are now rampant, ruining the game, except it isn't a game.
While also being handicapped (budget cuts) and undermined (blamed) by politicians. On the one hand politicians demand lower crime, but at the same time denounce the police as the source of societal conflict.
High enough for them to buy APCs for staging public relations events.
NYPD is about 11% of total NYC city budget
So, somehow were spending more and the opinion is that were spending less.
A justice system optimized for public safety will err on the side of putting aggressive, anti-social individuals behind bars rather than making absolutely sure they really did do the thing most of them were caught doing. Public safety is therefore orthogonal or even somewhat opposed to the pursuit of truth.
https://www.youtube.com/c/jcscriminalpsychology
I'm not particular fond of the lying though and the asymmetry ... You can't lie to law enforcement but they can lie to you.
Actual public safety is an afterthought. The point isn’t to solve a crime, but to punish enemies or to boost conviction rates.
Are we talking about the people who participated in a violent insurrection against the US, or is this another group?
If you want to have nice things (eg: a democracy) then you can’t be letting people who commit some mild treason off just because they’re dumbasses who got caught up in the moment.
The next yahoo who decides they want to try and block the peaceful transfer of power needs to 100% understand that they will be prosecuted.
[0] https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-ar... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-84
They were protesting just fine outside of Congress, why did they go into congress? Why were they trying to find Nancy Pelosi? Why did the Capitol police think they needed to use deadly force?
Might have had something to do with the violent death threats some of the invading fools were shouting…
Why do people protest anything? Nothing changes. It’s a futile effort.
Why did that capitol cop shoot that lady thru a window? Cops gunna cop and they always lie about it afterwards. Probably needs de-escalation training.
The suspect is repeatedly reminded of his right to counsel, given water, asked if he is hungry, etc. The intent here is to firmly establish that the suspect's rights have been respected - key to making sure the interrogation tapes are admissible in court.
The interrogator then proceeds to tell a series of lies about his background and interests to build rapport with the suspect - he's clearly done his research beforehand to understand which buttons he needs to push.
By the end of the two-hours-and-change video, Minassian has opened up and produced a confession so good that his defence counsel could only try to argue that he wasn't of sound mind.
Not all interrogators are this skilled - this was a very high-profile case, so the Toronto Police deployed their best - but it seems obvious that better training rather than banning useful techniques would result in more favourable outcomes.
There is still the issue of innocent people getting caught up in the system or admitting to crimes they didn't commit, but I'd suggest that there are better approaches like, once again, education of the public. You might be uncomfortable and scared for some period of time, but you do not have to talk to the police.
I feel like there's a fundamental difference between an interrogator lying about his own back story to build rapport and them lying about other evidence, witnesses or their authority to make a deal, etc.
If you're not being charged with anything, you're not required to voluntarily show up for an interrogation. If you're detained, you can always ask "Am I free to leave?" and, if they answer yes, just walk out.
Police are permitted to keep asking you the same question even if you repeatedly say "My lawyer has instructed me not to answer questions", but obviously there's a line where it will start to look abusive on the tape and where the interrogator will just get frustrated and end the interview.
You can't be compelled to testify against yourself, but others can potentially be compelled to testify against you (on the condition that their testimony can't be used to incriminate them in the future).
My neighborhood in Chicago has a cop enclave inside it and they are absolutely lighting up our neighborhood political discussion group irate about this law, talking about how many murders and rapists are going to go free.
How many murderers and rapists are minors? Probably not many.
While higher for whites, for African American victims, The close rate was near 20%, something most Americans may associate with Guatemala or Mexico - https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/10/09/768552458/chicago-s...
Based on arrest histories of gang members and failures to prosecute even closed cases, one should assume that there are a large number of serial killers operating in Chicago, many of who started as minors.
While most middle and upper class Americans dismiss this as just gang members killing each other, so it’s no big deal, this clearly would not be tolerated in a largely white suburban setting, gang associated or otherwise.
> An additional concern is the varying methods by which homicides are classified as “gang-related.” The most commonly used is the “member-based” approach, in which a homicide is classified as gang-related if the victim was and/or the perpetrator is a gang member.
[] https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-5-how-are-g...
Also, tons of people (850k - 1.4m) are classified as gang members. The criteria for being a gang member is very broad and includes friend groups who've been arrested:
- The group has three or more members, generally aged 12–24.
- Members share an identity, typically linked to a name, and often other symbols.
- Members view themselves as a gang, and they are recognized by others as a gang.
- The group has some permanence and a degree of organization.
- The group is involved in an elevated level of criminal activity.
[] https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-1-what-is-a...
[] 850k https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-4-how-exten...
[] 1.4 million (page 9) https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/stats-services-publicati...
If you calculate out the statistics, there're tons of people classified as gang members
{ latino: ~50%, black: ~30%, white non-latino: ~15% }
{ latino: 450k-700k, black: 250-400k, white non-latino: 125-200k }
(I don't know how they classify black latino vs white latino)
[] https://nationalgangcenter.ojp.gov/about/faq#faq-11-what-is-...
You can compare these numbers to the total population of males (90% of gang members are male) in the 14-24 age range (I excluded the 10-14 population even though it's included in the 12-24 age range). Classifying 10% of the population as being in a gang basically makes the label useless since you can then call almost anything "gang-related".
{ latino: 5m, black: 3m, white non-latino: 15m }
{ latino: ~10%, black: ~10%, white non-latino: 1% }
[] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2011.B01001I
[] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B01001B
[] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B01001A
Also Promissory Estoppel is a concept in contract law. Do you think a reasonable person would think that a police interrogation is a contract? Does it meet the elements of a contract? I don't think so.
Not just while in prison, but afterwards in many states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement_in_t...
Juries should only be allowed to hear objective facts. No character testimonies, no eye witnesses, no confessions after a 12 hour interrogation. Objective facts only.
This would likely mean guilty people don't get convicted, but I think that is a worthy tradeoff for a more fair justice system. An innocent person going to jail is much more egregious than a guilty person going free.
The jury is the People's seat and primary check on the exercise of Governmental power. It's one more layer to the overall setup of checks and balances.
The thing is, we have studies upon studies upon studies that show repeatedly and undoubtedly that witness testimony is shit. If you show 10 people an event and ask them to describe what they saw an hour later, they will describe it in 10 different ways, frequently changing facts, adding things that never happened, or omitting important details. In trials, you get witness testimony from years before, and it's treated as if every single word said is absolute objective truth - like, we have the science to prove that no, actually, most likely it isn't, and it should be treated as "maybe true" at best.
Like so many things, I think the mistake here is to assume you can educate your way out of this. You could send every citizen through a six-week course on the problems with eye-witness testimony and some percentage of them will come out on the other side of that training insisting that, nah, if somebody says they saw the crime, then they saw it. We're talking about deep psychological biases carefully shaped by hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
An eyewitness will tell the DA that they don't remember shit about what happened years ago, and the DA will reassure them that they police have ways of making them remember.
Source: A close friend of mine is getting pulled in to testify in a criminal case about some junkie that they may have called the police on three years ago. He has called the police so many times, and has dealt with so many sketchy, drug-influenced people, he can't even remember what the person in question did.
Do you mean to imply that we've seen examples of how the justice system, on balance, does not benefit society at large? As in, adding up all the positives and negatives of the justice system, we'd be better off without it? If so, I'd want to see what those examples you mention are.
I think the principle could and should apply to some extent in this situation here too.
Something like: if you were misled into making a confession - perhaps relying on a promise or lie told to you by the interviewer - then at the very least that confession should be considered deeply suspect.
I've spent the past two weeks watching JCS - Criminal Psychology on YouTube. Lies are clearly a core part of interrogations. I haven't ever seen one where lying wasn't a core part of the strategy of the interrogator. Go watch some videos on that channel. It's really, really interesting.
Never talk to the police.
Lets hit a few high points:
End the 'boys club', actually go after sex crimes with a sense of urgency and not let rape kits pile up in evidence rooms, untested?[1]
Not run straight up black sites?[2]
Properly allow freedom of speech and expression, and not come down harder on protests the police themselves don't agree with?[3]
Do a little introspection and address the rampant domestic abuse perpetrated by police?[4]
[0]https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2019/07/nati...
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-poli...
[3]https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/us/protest-disparity-study-tr...
[4]https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
Because when you rob it from the outside you're probably using violence to threaten people with their lives. You don't think that's many, many times worse than someone cooking the books or stealing from the register?
https://sneak.berlin/20200628/the-problem-with-police-in-ame...
Societal order is the dominant power structures of the society, with little heed given to individuals.
The difference between those things is who the police actually do anything for. Who gets (violently) arrested and who gets away with it is strongly connected with your position in social order. Simply put, steal $20 from the register or a loaf of bread from the store and the state will pony up tens of thousands of dollars to try and arrest you, detain you, prosecute you, and punish you. But if you decide to steal overtime from your employees, what do you think the chances are of you finding yourself in cuffs? It's estimated that wage theft involves three fold as much theft as other kinds of robbery combined; why is violence necessary to stop 1/4 of theft, but not the remaining 3/4?
Take a look at protestors too, and see how the police change treatment based on the content of the protest. It's been shown that cops are 3x more likely to react violently to left wing protests than right wing protests in general, and 3.5x more likely to attack peaceful left wing protests than peaceful right wing protests. That is not protecting society, that is protecting the social order.
> As in, what would a police who’s job it was to “protect society” do that current police do not?
Processing all the rape kits they have sitting around would be a fantastic start. Nationally the clearance rates for all kinds of violent crimes are abysmal, maybe cops should stop focusing on grifting overtime and do something about that?
More importantly, a cop whose job is to protect society should stop doing things that are actively harmful to society. Such a list would include but is not limited to:
Not shooting unarmed people, not choking a handcuffed man to death, not tear gassing whole city blocks after being ordered not to by their bosses, not pulling over black people at unusually high rates, not destroying homeless camps, not destroying cooling centers for the homeless during a historic heat wave, not lying to children to make them confess, not beating a family near a protest and then pretending that "antifa" abandoned the child at a "riot", not arresting citizens that they ran into while driving recklessly, not lying in court repeatedly and constantly to get convictions of the poor and powerless, not abusing people in their custody, not raping people in their custody, and not protecting other cops that blatantly break the law.
Cops in the United States have effective blanket immunity for anything short of calmly strangling a handcuffed man on camera[0]. Not only is there no effective means for them to be prosecuted, given the close reliance DAs have on cops, but there is also a specific carve out for them to be protected from civil liability that is absurdly protective of them. Simply put, unless if a cop does something that has specific precedent for, you cannot sue them. And very little precedent can be made because nobody can sue them in order to create precedent. This gets down to the level of "sending the attack dogs against a surrendering person in the woods is a violation of their rights, but not in a 'grassy ditch' because there is no precedent for that in a ditch. Case dismissed". A police force that is supposed to protect society would itself be expected to actually follow the laws that they are nominally enforcing, not be given special protection from illegal conduct.
> Or vice-versa, would such a police still protect from theft or violence?
Do you believe that cops actually protect you from theft and violence? How soon do you believe a cop will be there if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night? Cops are really there to punish people after the fact, not to protect you[1][2]. How much effort they'll put into actually solving the crime is very much dependent on who you are and what happened to you. Ask a rape survivor how sympathetic and helpful the cops were, if you can stomach such stories.
0 - Make no mistake, Derek Chauvin would still be a cop if that had not been video taped. The official police press release after that was that a man died due to a "medical incident" in their care; a blatant lie. Makes you wonder how many citizens cops have murdered and blamed it on drugs or "medical incidents".
1 - Well, that and arrest random people to find drugs and steal money from citizens to fund their own department.
2 - They in fact have no legal obligation to try and protect you from violence.
steal $100, go to jail
steal $1,000,000,000 pay lawyers so that you give back 200,000,000 and keep the rest.
1. Lies about the process / promissary lies. e.g. "If you just confess, you can go home." 2. Lies about evidence. e.g. "We talked to {Friend|Family|Co-conspirator} and they said you did it and they have the {item} to prove it. It's not going to look good if you continue to lie to me."
#1 seems obviously bad to me. Too high of a risk of tricking innocent people into thinking they can end the stress by falsely confessing.
#2 seems less bad, possibly beneficial. There are other comments about how this can speed up interrogations by getting people who are guilty to think they've been caught and confess. I could be convinced otherwise.
In my opinion, sounds like 1 and 2 should be illegal for minors. But 1 should be illegal in general, for adults too.
Alternatively, he might think that his friend actually implicated him and that he has the choice of saying nothing and being convicted because of that, or confessing to a lesser charge.
Alternately, he might just think that police who'd fake evidence are corrupt, and that corrupt police could do a lot worse, like fake evidence against his whole family or just shoot him, so he'd better confess just to come out of this alive.
Not everywhere. The UK hasn't allowed police to lie when interviewing suspects since the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act, known as PACE.
It would be a good idea if countries (not just the US and not just in policing) were to look for best practice outside their own borders occasionally.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_an...
Also, it's not really true that merely remaining silent is taken to be an indication of guilt. The point is that an adverse inference may be drawn from silence in basically the same way that an adverse inference may be drawn from a statement made to police. The prosecution can't just say "the defendant said nothing when questioned and is therefore guilty".
The point is that in the US, the prosecutor can't even suggest (well, they can suggest, but an objection will be raised) that the defendant's silence is an indication of guilt.
[1] Anyone who was compelled to testify against themselves would just point out that they did so under duress, and surely, a reasonable jury would throw that testimony out. I certainly would. For some reason though, we don't expect juries to be reasonable on this point.
Indeed, yes, prosecutors have more free rein in the UK to suggest to the jury that someone's silence during question is incriminating. I just wonder if this makes much of a difference in practice. Do you know of any examples of cases in Britain where a conviction would most likely not have been obtained if the prosecutors were not permitted to do this?
I ran into a similar situation once: an officer wanted to hear a very specific thing from me, so he asked me a question, then interrupted me mid-sentence when he heard the substring he wanted (the full sentence was along the lines of "we were planning on doing X, but not for another 5 years", where the point of contention was whether they could prove whether I was planning on doing X immediately), never mind that I was explicitly explaining how his theory was all wrong.
Thankfully for me, this was with the Canada Border agency, which has an appeals process, and surely enough, when they read my side of the story, they overruled the officer in my favor.
So, the defendant saying those magic words should automatically erase any statements the defendant made, whether or not the magic words are true? Or should perhaps, both the claim of inducement and the other statements remain in evidence, with the trier of fact deciding on the weight to give each?
This is so obvious, it's not clear why this has to be spelled out. The purpose of civil rights like the fifth amendment is not making life easy for criminals, the purpose is protecting innocent people.
You can argue that the harm inflicted by some particular procedure to innocent people exceeds the benefits, but that becomes a utilitarian debate, rather than one about philosophical dogma.
I'm not sure what the benefit to society is, as you asked, but the benefit for law enforcement is that they can escape the intent of 4th amendment.
Also, if you report yourself before the authorities know that the crime took place, you get an automatic reduction in your sentence (article 65 inciso II item b of the Brazilian Penal Code)
This is true and there is power in all manners of things, including very abusive, immoral and possibly illegal things; there is a lot of power in threatening physical (or psychological) violence to people, for example.
I guess the question is about which usage of power we should (ideally) endorse as a society as a matter of course .
AIUI, it's pretty common that when they can't get you for the crime they think you committed, that they'll just goad you into a casual mis-statement (i.e., lying), and lock you up for the lie. That's exactly what happened to Martha Stewart, for example. What (apparently) seemed to her to be a minor omission that had no bearing on the case, suddenly becomes the cause for her prosecution.
The end result of this is that anyone with a clue knows that the best policy is, simply, never talk to police. There's nothing you can say that will make things better (the die is already cast), and you can do yourself a world of hurt. And you can't even know ahead of time whether you're suspect. So the best course of action is simply to refuse to talk to police ever.
How is a situation in which the public refuses to help the police any worse than taking these tools away from the police?
Obligatory anecdote: I went skeet shooting with a friend. The next day, for some reason, I still had a bunch of spent shotgun shells sitting on the table. That morning the police came to my door, and I let them in the house to talk since it was cold out. They started asking for information about an incident where someone had shot out a car window with a BB gun. Later I realized that I had those empty shotgun shells sitting right in their sight. If you're not aware, "BB" is actually the designation of a particular small size of shot (like #8 being used for deer and #4 or #0 used for turkey or birds; BB is smaller than #0). So although I knew nothing of the BB incident, and was certainly innocent, I had inadvertently given the police some reason to suspect my involvement. In actuality, nothing came of this, but given the way these things go, I would have been safer to have just said "sorry, officer", and refused to deal with them.
(I highly doubt officers will still be held responsible for violating the law. Look how much noise and chaos had to happen for a single on-film execution by cop to have consequences.)
Edit: Geez, I was just answering the question... At the end of the day, it's up to society to determine whether it thinks the effectiveness of the method is worth the potential moral hazard of false confessions under pressure. In my opinion, there does need to be better policy for police departments to assign little weight to confessions with zero corroboration that cannot even accurately describe the facts of the case.
So the end justifies the means. I'm not a fan of that philosophy, as it can be used to justify all kinds of things and leads to a lack of integrity.
Eg the police officer that interrogated Terrill Swift will now be held criminally responsible for inducing a false confession.
That's been tried at various times and places in world history. It doesn't have a good record.
I suppose in many instances lies and bluffs have resulted in the desired outcome.
But not all lies/bluffs are the same, and I agree with you that telling a suspect in interrogation that they have immunity if they just say X is problematic, but I think it is reflected in the current case law and any evidence obtained in such a scenario would likely be suppressed.
I’ve seen more than a few interrogations, a similar one went something like this:
Cop: look, we just want to recover the gun, we don’t care about anything else, just tell us where the gun is.
Suspect: oh…you just want the gun?
Cop: yeah.
Suspect: yeah, I bet you do.
Now the thing is this suspect actually shot someone from his car into an adjacent car, he fled and discarded the firearm, then returned to the scene after police had arrived and he was immediately arrested. It always amazed me someone so dumb as to drive right back to the scene of the crime and deliver himself into the hands of police was so aware and savvy during the interrogation.
no one would ever get convicted if police didn't lie. If no one can ever get convicted, either we can murder rape and steal without consequence or we'd have to live in an absolute monitored police state. I think its beneficial they can lie.
the real world isn't a SVU episode on TV with DNA, high resolution video, and witnesses. I don't know the percentage, but the vast majority of crime has and never will have evidence other than a witness or a confession.
Also saying they can't lie is not easy, as you need an oracle of truth. So if something untruthful is said, does that mean they have to be let go? you mistake the date and they can go free? its impossible to police truth.
But I notice that in your statement, it's all about the conviction, not about the guilt.
What's the advantage to society of allowing interviewers to lie (to anyone, let alone kids)? Not just insinuate something like "your partner's in the next room, it's only a matter of time until he talks so you should come clean now", but blatantly lie and then be able to rely on the result of that in court?
It kinda feels a little like the common law doctrine of Promissary Estoppel [0] where if someone relies on something you've promised, you can't then hold them responsible for relying on that thing.
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/promissory_estoppel