If you haven't seen the video Moxie mentions in the opening couple paragraphs, "don't talk to the police," I HIGHLY recommend watching it.
Not only is it informative, it is fascinating and very well delivered.
Not only is it informative, it is fascinating and very well delivered.
Example: the neighbors see/hear you having rough sex with your wife and report it as abuse. The police knock on the door, you have two options:
A) Explain (better: let your wife explain) that the neighbors probably heard you playing around and promise to be more discreet in the future. The police agree that more discretion = better and leave.
B) Wall of silence. The police take you in just to be sure. Your wife tries to testify in your favor at the trial but everyone thinks she's just making excuses for an actually abusive boyfriend (because that happens). Your life is ruined by the conviction, maybe her life is too. Even if you don't get convicted, rumors will spread and your time and money will be wasted on legal matters.
Am I being naive or was the lawyer overstating his argument? Strategy A is strictly worse than B if the case goes to court, but that still means that B could be the better strategy before you've been arrested.
Why would she do that? The only way you've gotten this far is because she's pressing charges.
I wouldn't be surprised if some states had laws that more or less forced the potential victim to go through the trial even if she intends on testifying in your favor. I dunno. Just sayin'.
IANAL and the little I know about the intersection of kinky sex and law comes from a single presentation I attended years ago during college. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly certain I have the broad strokes drawn correctly.
On second look, it seems that the state has a lot of discretion in these cases.
Sadomasochism is probably illegal in most states, but no prosecutor seems eager for the shitshow that would happen if they tried to prosecute something that was clearly consensual.
They'd never be able to convict if the both of you refused to testify. There'd be no evidence.
I freely admit that this is a worst case scenario: a court in SF isn't likely to convict on the basis of "illegal sex", but maybe you were traveling; hotels have notoriously thin walls and some places in the USA take a much dimmer view of this kind of thing.
None of this is relevant to my original point. Even if you're acquitted your "wall of silence" will have cost you time, money, and reputation, making B worse than A UNLESS you condition your expectation on the case going to court, which you shouldn't, because the point in time when you decide B vs A happens before going to court is a foregone conclusion.
Talking to the police has a high certainty they'll present your statement, or part of it, as admission of guilt and that leads directly to jail.
I'd rather waste money than my life. Me and my wife can later sue our neighbours for damages and try to get our money back from them. But I can't sue them to give me back jail time.
"Anything you say, can and will be used against you".
And people are still not freaked out about having the government know everything they've ever said or done? I think the problem is most people just don't realize this or don't think about the type of abuses that this could create.
The part you left out of the quote was "used against you, in a court of law". Even if NSA should find info on people, it won't be admissible in a court of law against U.S. citizens essentially by definition, so from the POV of a random guy on the street it's a question of whether the nerd sitting at the NSA console is worse than the nerd sitting at the GMail ops room console.
FBI would probably be a bigger worry, but no one seems to care about them for years now.