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Comment by belovedeagle | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but I don't see why the detective shouldn't be held in contempt anyways, along with the prosecutors. It's nothing short of a blatant attempt to deceive the court to present "evidence" in the first place when you're not prepared to observe the defendants' due process right to confront witnesses and have access to evidence. As soon as the so-called evidence was put before the court, the detective and prosecutors should have had but two options: provide all details to the defense or go to jail. It's highly preferable that a murderer go free than the government be allowed to claim private contracts with domestic spying providers, contracts to which the detective and prosecutors aren't even party, are "national security" issues. It's disgusting how the detective on the stand expected those magic words to waive the defendant's rights when told to the judge, if the article is to be believed.

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IANAL either but I do have some experience with court proceedings. I'm surprised the defense didn't jump on this opportunity to file a motion to dismiss the case for lack of evidence (or maybe they did after the article was written). Given what little information about the case itself is presented in the article, it sounds like the cellphone evidence and anything gathered as a result of it, made up the bulk of the case against the kid.

The article did say the prosecution also claimed to have a confession from the defendant.

I thought that was the other juvenile defendant, the one not being tried as an adult; maybe I misread it.

Edit: I did misread it, sorry. It was Taylor who confessed. I wouldn't be surprised though, if the defense still uses the near-contempt and the overall lack of evidence to try to plead down or even still seek a dismissal.

If you give up a confession when confronted with inadmissible evidence that should not be brought before a court, should the confession count as admissible?

Under our current system... yes.

Cops can lie to you to extract a confession.

"Anything you say can and will be used against you a court of law..." means exactly that. Anything you say will be used against you, and will never be used to help you. Even if you talk and it would "help" your case, it will be thrown out as "hearsay".[1]

[1] "In Praise of the Fifth Amendment Right to Not Be a Witness Against Yourself": http://youtu.be/6wXkI4t7nuc

It's best to assume that cops will lie to you. I sat on a jury for a murder trial where the defendant confessed while high. His lawyer was totally incompetent as well, but the confession pretty much did him in.

A public defender of my acquaintance has a client who's in prison for a murder he definitely did not commit, because the police showed him a bunch of entirely falsified evidence, snowed him into thinking he'd gone crazy and then forgotten afterwards, and took down his bewildered "I guess I did do it" as a confession.

That's incredibly disturbing. I guess a lot of the criminal justice system has a bedrock, usually unstated, assumption that people know what they did and didn't do. That assumption is already questionable some of the time, but I suppose falls apart further when evidence can be fabricated to an extent that makes defendants doubt their sanity.

I wonder if this will occur more frequently in an era when people can start to create highly realistic video that appears to be of a particular person performing a particular act (so someone can show you full-blown "surveillance camera footage" of you doing something that you didn't do).

From the little I understand of psychology, essentially all you need to do is get the accused to doubt their memory, then push them over the edge. Consequently, I think that high quality CCTV wouldn't be necessary. A blurry hint would be enough to convince a softened defendant.

FWIW, here in the UK we have an entertainer called Derren Brown. He specializes in psychological "magic". A while ago he did a show where he set up a punter to believe he had committed murder. The mark reacted exactly as your friend client. IIRC, he actually gave himself up to the police, really believing was guilty. IMO, very disturbing and going by the TV episode, even though Im sure it didnt show everything, too simple.

If any one is interested in tracking it down, Derren Brown - The Experiments. Episode The Guilt Trip.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Derren_Brown#D...

Added: Sorry, the point is that Im shocked that you are saying your police actually do this, in this way. When watching these shows its easy to assume that there is some extra trickery going on, so it cant happen to a real person in real life. Your case shows that it can.

I have long lost trust that anything Derren Brown does is legit. I was already suspicious it was bullshit and then he "predicted" the lottery numbers

I now have no reason to believe any of it is anything but actors and TV magic

Well, i found the explaination of him winning against a group of chess grandmasters by playing them against each other and only playing the weakest player quite convincing, and memorizing 10 moves as well as playing a good game of chess isn't really too far out there. The little bit of predictive magic with the number of pieces is almost certainly trickery though.

The confession is admissible as evidence, it doesn't result in an automatic conviction.

Now that the defence knows about the stingray they will paint the rest of the case as fruit from the poison tree. They just need a reason to call the officer and ask about the stingray. The prosecutor can't withdraw the defences' questions.

The defence will merely reintroduce the evidence as evidence of police misconduct, this isn't going away anytime soon.

Shouldn't the confession be thrown out too? Fruit of the forbidden tree of cellphone data. The police are allowed to lie during interrogations, but they're not allowed to search/seize private property (without probable cause) to fuel their interrogations.

This guys lawyer should have left that court room, and went immediately to federal courthouse and filed a civil rights violation suit. the ACLU still should

But you have to be careful with this lest this incentivizes the creation of parallel-reconstruction-like fabrications of the source of evidence.

Even if the only result is tossing the evidence that will still incentive Parallel Construction, which has been going on for a long long time.

The legal System is setup to encourage this. The only way to prevent that would be independent audits of all investigations which would be both expensive, time prohibitive, and over time the "independent" auditors would be corrupted leading to the need for auditors of the auditors, etc etc etc

it is the "who watches and watchers" problem, you find a solution to this you let me know because you will be a very rich person.

What? That's like saying that prosecuting perjury too harshly will incentivize better fabricated story coaching by lawyers. Or, in general, prosecuting crimes incentivizes more perfect crimes.

"If we punish crime, criminals will get smarter!"

Touche. Didn't think that my argument would sound like that, but it does.

For those unfamiliar with parallel construction (like I was) an intro:

Using thermal imaging to scan neighborhoods for the lights used to grow marijuana is considered a "search" by the courts and police have a warrant to do this. Let's say the police ignore this and go around secretly scanning cities without a warrant. They find out that John is growing weed in his basement, but they can't arrest him because this evidence is inadmissible. They follow John for a while and see that he interacts with Pete. Pete has a warrant out on him based on some unpaid parking tickets. So the cops arrest Pete, find weed, and get him to finger John as the source. Now the cops can get a warrant, search John's house, and "oh hey look there's all this marijuana growing here!"

This evidence is normally inadmissible as it was derived from an illegal search. It's very difficult to catch unless the police stupidly submit it to the court (as in the OP). Not using this tactic requires a high-degree of morality and/or oversight of police officers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

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