5^th Amendment Rights

[rat­ings]
A friend of mine sent me a link with the fol­low­ing video clips from YouTube. Remember, I’m not a lawyer, and as such I don’t give legal advice, but here is a set of inter­est­ing clips. The first is from a defense attorney’s per­spec­tive, the sec­ond is from an inves­ti­gat­ing officer’s per­spec­tive. Listen to what they have to say, and be sure to talk to a lawyer if you are ever ques­tioned by police.

Remember even police do this. I’ve seen cases of offi­cer involved shoot­ings, or inter­nal affair cases, where the police offi­cer was absolutely in the right, did noth­ing wrong, but they weren’t going to answer any ques­tions with­out a lawyer being present. Cops don’t even answer other cop’s ques­tions, they must know something.

Defense Attorney’s Perspective

Investigating Officer’s Perspective

Now never say­ing any­thing to police isn’t what one should take away from here. For exam­ple, I was vis­it­ing my home town last week­end. I ran into a sobri­ety check­point. There must have been 20 offi­cers lined up, I was waved up to the front of the line and asked a series of questions.

You have any­thing to drink tonight sir?
–No sir.

Are you headed home sir?
–No sir.

Headed out to a party tonight sir?
–No sir. (while my 6 year old son and his 62 year old grand­mother are in the car)

Have a good night sir.

I answered the ques­tions because I knew I wasn’t going to incrim­i­nate myself, and I hadn’t done any­thing wrong. Now if I had been asked to exit the vehi­cle and per­form FSTs, I would have refused, even though I hadn’t had any alco­hol to drink in prob­a­bly 3 months.