Ex: "If you confess, it will just be just a week in jail, and if you don't, you'll be executed. And your agedmother will have to pay the fines, making her homeless."
"[A]ny evidence that the accused was threatened, tricked, or cajoled into a waiver will, of course, show that the Defendant did not voluntarily waive his privilege." -Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 477 (1966).
If the detectives make any kind of promises or threats then your lawyer will be able to suppress the entire interview.
Here is the waiver sheet used by the US Treasury, and this is similar to the waiver sheets used by police departments all over the USA, it reads "I understand the statement of my rights above as they have been read and explained to me and I waive them freely and voluntarily, without threat or intimidation, and without any promise of reward or immunity."
https://www.tigta.gov/sites/default/files/publications/2022-...
It's awful hard to say they threatened you when you just signed a paper that said they didn't.
Good luck proving it's not yours.
There will be witnesses. Maybe even video of you signing something.
And that's if the judge is even acting in good faith, which is not common.
For prison or something, I'd hope the forged signature would be contestable for the average person, but I'm not optimistic.
If you can prove it. This is often the tricky part.
On top of that, they could add some sort of chain of custody for the accused. For instance gaps in the recording between arrest and trial (solo bathroom breaks and conferring with defense attorneys excepted) could mean the charges are dropped.
* Lower the standard for proof
* Make it harder to to avoid public scrutiny for covered interactions
If you say “I want to talk to a lawyer” - anything after that is not admissible. Full stop. This is generally enforced.
Same with Miranda warnings.
The problem is clear rules tend to be a bit arbitrary.
Can you change the wording on a Miranda warning a bit? Why that specific wording?
So instead we have very unclear, but more constitutionally rigorous rules.
It's a significant difference when those acts become impractical, because you can't spout all the other smaller lies which are needed to shock and scare the victim into a state where they'll fall for the big ones.
1. provide evidence of those lies.
2. create consequences for spouting the lies
They are recorded - a lot of countries outside the US actually require it be recorded and if it is not, the interview and anything said in it are simply inadmissible.
Even in the US, recording is standard practice for any meaningful felony. Unlike body worn cameras, it does not get magically lost, and when it does, the interview is generally not admitted, or a defense lawyer tears it to shreds if the detective tries to use his notes. While there are always cases of recordings "being lost" or whatever, the rate here is very low, compared to body worn cameras or anything else.
The case where they don't do recording is usually resource related.
There are around 20,000 law enforcement agencies in the US. 80% of them have less than 25 full time employees 15% of those have 1 full time employee.
While most still do recording, it might only be for major felonies or whatever because they don't have the manpower to have handle recording 24/7.
Given that, you won't achieve 100% compliance without something drastic (for example, funding and paying for 24/7 video recording in every department). Even there, at best you'll just end up with only the cases where software/hardware went wrong.
Note that i have no love for police (actually, much the opposite), but i'm also realistic - i'm not sure it's easy to solve the problem of having tons of small, low-budget police departments, be required to record.
(the UK, by comparison, has 43 regional law enforcement forces, and is down to 300 police stations or something like this)
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here, because the problem did not abruptly vanish in 1966.
For example, Marty Tankleff, a then-teenager wrongfully convicted in 1990 for the murder of his parents. Even thought a defense lawyer arrived before Police lied to him that his father had named him as the attacker before falling unconscious, and even though a defense lawyer arrived before he could be tricked into signing a confession, the unsigned confession was still core to the prosecutions' case.
There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. For example, police use civil forfeiture to steal more stuff than all criminals combined.
That wasn’t true in the 1990s.
I'm betting the police.
This falls under the "voluntariness requirement" as part of Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Specifically, Rule 11(b)(2) requires that the court "address the defendant personally in open court and determine that the plea is voluntary and did not result from force, threats, or promises (other than promises in a plea agreement)."
The threat of 40 years of your life (basically a death sentence, you will probably die in that time, many you know and love will die in that time, you will not be able to restart any sort of life if you don't die) because you chose to exercise your right to trial instead of pleading guilty is not considered a threat, coercion, or cajoling by the United State Federal Justice system.
This voluntariness inquiry is a key part of what's known as the "Rule 11 colloquy" - the series of questions and statements that must occur between the judge and defendant before a guilty plea can be accepted.
Plea deals/plea bargaining was not legal at the start of the United States and was actually considered unconstitutional. The practice wasn't officially recognized by the Supreme Court as legitimate until 1970 in Brady v. United States on the grounds that not EVERY plea is coercion.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_11
https://naacp.org/resources/eliminating-illegal-practice-tri...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brady_v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Jackson
Someone who is innocent may (unfortunately) find it their best course of action to take a plea deal and they shouldn't have to falsely admit their guilt to accept it. It's not perfect but it removes a lot of the coercive elements from the transaction.
I don't see how it removes in any way that the threat of imposition of the trial tax is a threat. If you can receive a 5 or 50 year sentence for the exact same crime, with the exact same circumstances other than taking a plea, the extra 45 years can not be considered anything but an explicit threat to take the plea. Or that pleas were considered unconstitutional at the founding of the US and only made legal in the 1960s.
The government only allows pleas for businesses that include a non admission of guilt. Admission of guilt is required as part of the Federal plea process, otherwise defendants could retain too many appeal rights (when you admit guilt from that point on you must prove a much higher 'actual innocence' legal standard on appeal and none of the easier standards like tainted evidence, corrupt officials, improper procedures can be applied to your case).
Maybe it's just me, but if I were falsely accused, I'd take a jury trial in a heartbeat over making a false confession. Just on principle alone. I understand why a guilty defendant might take a plea bargain, but it blows my mind that this works on some people who are innocent.
I'll tell you this... the judge could tell the jury to ignore it, or declare a mistrial, but if someone had offered me a plea bargain for something I was innocent of, I would tell the jury that I'd refused it. Whether that was stricken from the record or not, at that point you're a political prisoner and you've done all you honestly can.
If we were talking about something where I had actually broken a law, I'd expect to lose. But if it were truly a case of mistaken identity? I'd almost certainly defend myself and be confident no jury would convict me.
It's possible that a lot of people don't have sufficient skills to pore through legal books and case histories the way we pore through examples of massive SQL queries, but I'm sure I'd be up to it. And thus I would never concede to a plea bargain for something I hadn't done. Moreover, the whole concept of doing so is so anathema that I wouldn't care if it was a choice between admitting false guilt or execution (as it was in the show trials of the Soviet Union)... I would tell em to execute me. There are things I'm not willing to live with, like making a false confession, so you had better fuckin kill me.
You realize people that represent themselves are fools? Court isn't about smarts, it's about knowing how to play the game, your relationship with the judge, all kinds of factors. Heck if you word things just slightly wrong, you are hit and your winning argument is ignored. And a judge won't help you get to the correct wording.
I spoke about jury trials, not about court procedure.
Or you can explain that as 'this can sometimes happen'.
No. Not even close.
Instead, plea deals need to be made illegal. Prosecutors who use plea deals in more than 2% of their cases in a given calendar year should face loss of law license for life, and 10 years in prison. It should be aggressively enforced and a strict liability crime (no "I lost track" excuses).
DAs would no longer be able to prosecute as many cases if most had to be taken to trial, and they would be much less permissive of cops who were filing borderline horseshit, who were refusing to use their discretion. Legislators would be less able to keep bad laws on the books, were it not for pervasive plea bargaining.
In my own county, I heard with my own ears the DA bragging about how they do about 4000 cases per year, but take fewer than 30 to trial. Changing the ritual words that need to be spoken isn't a solution to anything.
That's the whole reason that the entire plea system is in place. Trials are so expensive and justice system is so inefficiently organized that everything would go to a standstill without the pleas. You'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way before you can abolish pleas.
Real bastion of freedom, the United States.
Plea deals hold their extortive power through the fact that it's often the only way people can get out of jail pre-trial when they can't afford excessive bail. But rather than doing bail reform which would fix that problem, we have the left getting rid of bail entirely in situations where it is inappropriate to do so. This means violent criminals can wreak more mayhem while released awaiting trial so that the right can complain about it and we'll swing right back to excessive bail.
The bail bondsman industry is basically this gigantic leach sucking bail money out of our country, but it has lobbyists and can't be banned outright. Bail is not supposed to be a pre-conviction fine, but when you have to go to a bail bondsman you don't get your bail money back even if you show for trial. If you could pony up the cash in its entirety, it's just "held", and you get it if you show for trial. Even if convicted, you get it back (it's not a fine).
Making bail bonding illegal would be a good start to fixing the problem, but it's politically unviable. Attack plea bargains first, DAs and prosecutors can't put up the same kind of political fight that the bonding industry can.
Your dumb rhetoric makes the problem worse, because everyone can tell it's made up horseshit and if you're lying about the details they figure you're lying about the problem too.
But trials are the point. If you're not doing trials, what the fuck are you even doing? If you can only afford so many trials, then only make that many indictments, and make sure you're only indicting the ones that matter. If somehow, you still need to do more, well then this will force the public and the government to spend the money to scale up the justice system so you can do more trials.
They don't want that to happen though, because if most of these plea deals went to trial, the public would discover just how much horseshit the charges were in the first place. They don't want it, because if they went to trial we'd see so much jury nullification it would all be for nought.
> ou'd have to first modernize justice system to work in more European way
There's nothing about the European way that much impresses me. One wonders what you see in it... is it that you see the results and mistake those for a product of the system, when they're just in large part a product of a different people/culture that can't be transferred to the US no matter how much you wish it so?
It's more about what I don't see. Plea deals, bail bonds industry, treating extorted confession as a solid proof, prison sentences to add up to more than a reasonable expected lifespan, discovering truth not being a goal of the trial, electability of judges, being judged by unprepared impressionable idiots aka jury. The whole thing is a sinister theatre that tries to keep the form of wild times when people didn't know any better while introducing so many ways for the parties to suck money out of the process at expense of the accuser, accused and the taxpayer. No justice system is perfect but US (and UK) one is so far that it's grotesque.
If a company representative lies and tells me the product comes with a ten year warranty when in fact it's only five years, that's fraud. You'd figure a lie with bigger consequences (jail, etc.) would be considered worse than fraud, but surprisingly not.
Some states forbid filing charges if the federal government already did.