I have a simple rule when dealing with LEO: say as little as possible and ask for a lawyer. If a ignorant defendant decides he wants to cross examine a tech without knowledge, then he is already screwing up and I have no mercy for ignorant people! So let him fail and I am all for giving him additional tools with which to fail!
Now, sometimes, like down here in Houston, the crime lab is so bad that it NEEDS an enema! They started losing cases left and right on appeals because the lab was misplacing evidence, crossing evidence, etc... Finally, someone came forward and admitted this! Had the techs been called to court, then they would have had to admit to having lost evidence, crossing evidence, etc...
If getting an innocent person off of charges takes four years, then I am ALL for the extra time! And as you said, most career criminals are NOT going to pull this because it might/probably will backfire unless they KNOW better.
If getting an innocent person off of charges takes four years, then I am ALL for the extra time! And as you said, most career criminals are NOT going to pull this because it might/probably will backfire unless they KNOW better.
But you won’t be all for it when you have an extra 5,000 criminals out on bail committing crimes while waiting for day 15,200 of a trial to get him off a charge that may or may not be all that serious anyway, or when they turn loose 2,000 prisoners because of overcrowding...I am not saying they never make a mistake, but at some point you need to make an assumption of competence until the person is proven otherwise...yes, there might be mistakes...I know...but the wheels of justice grind slowly, as they say and too much more and they will halt...the reason they typically don’t want people defending themselves is for time reasons, procedural issues, etc...the backlog in courts is just as lethal at times, by the number of repeat offenses committed while out on another beef...
I have a simple rule when dealing with LEO: say as little as possible and ask for a lawyer.
I’ve been lucky; not too much experience, but you can bet your ass I would never try to show someone in a courtroom how smart I was...the last words of a fool; “I don’t need a GD lawyer, I didn’t do anything.”