You are so completely off-base on this that I despair of being able to explain the concept of Constitutionally-protected privacy and property rights to you.
And, if you think that happily cooperating with anything and everything that the police want at all times is going to make them look more "favorably" upon you, you are dead wrong. In point of fact, many guilty people eagerly cooperate with requests for warrantless searches. Hard to believe, but true.
All I can say is that exercising your rights (that is, the right to keep silent, the right to be represented by counsel, and the right to refuse searches without a warrant) does NOT indicate guilt. It demonstrates that you are not an utter fool!
All I can say is that exercising your rights (that is, the right to keep silent, the right to be represented by counsel, and the right to refuse searches without a warrant) does NOT indicate guilt. It demonstrates that you are not an utter fool!
Well said and very true. Our Founding Fathers had a reason to secure each American citizen's protections....abuse of power, for one, innocent until proven guilty, for another; our Fifth Amendment for the right not to say something that can be [twisted around and taken out of context] used against you for yet another.
Don't despair, and save your pedantic tone. I know the Constitution and I don't need your explanation.
Your argument makes sense....to a criminal.
My wife is a Federal Special Agent. She's not interested in closing cases by railroading innocents, she's interested in finding the guilty %!@%!$#@ and putting them behind bars. People who have committed no crimes, but who are suspects because of their proximity to the crime scene, spouses or friends of the victim, etc, cooperate with her. They answer her questions. They allow permissive searches. This allows the police to ELIMINATE potential suspects and find the real bad guy. It's not always obvious who committed a crime. The guilty are typically discovered through a process of elimination.
Bad guys lie to her all the time. They don't cooperate. They demand warrants. They won't talk to her. They act in the manner you suggest one should act when interacting with police. If you're guilty of a crime and want to get away with it, it's logical to the act this way. But if you're not guilty, and you're uncooperative, i.e. demand warrants, won't talk without a lawyer, etc., it's logical that the human beings who make up the local, state, and federal police agencies are going to suspect that you ARE guilty because you're behaving that way. And you will attract their attention. That's their job. In doing so, you will divert investigative resources away from the real criminal.
As a law-abiding citizen, aren't you glad that criminals do stupid things like allow warrantless searches and get caught? Do you want to see criminals guilty of crimes escape the consequences of their actions? Do you want to make it hard for police to do their jobs? Do you want to see the guilty go free? What's wrong with cooperating with police when you can help with a criminal investigation? If everyone behaved in the manner you prescribe, the police would not be able to solve many crimes now would they?
If you lived next door to the San Diego family that is missing its daughter would you not talk to the police? Would you not allow them to bring the dog into your house so that they could clear you as a suspect? If you said no, the police would be right to suspect that you had something to do with that crime. If they didn't suspect you, they'd be incompetent! You would be hindering the investigation by not helping, and by diverting resources toward you that could be used to find the real bad guy who molested and killed a little girl. If you cooperate, you're quickly ruled out and law enforcement can get on with doing its very important job of finding the real creep.
As I said, exercise your rights. You're free to do so. But there are consequences to the good guys and victims. My value system recognizes that along with our rights, we have civic responsibilities, one of which is cooperating with police when possible.
The ten-year-old, home from school with the flu, listened through the door as a man said his car had broken down and he needed help. Jeanine, dressed in a nightgown picturing one of Snow White's dwarfs, with the words "I'm Sleepy," told him she was all alone and couldn't let him in. The man kicked in the front door, carried Jeanine to an upstairs bedroom, wrapped her in a sheet, and taped a towel around her eyes. Her body was discovered forty-eight hours later, less than two miles from the house. An autopsy revealed that she had been sodomized and that her skull had been crushed by a blunt instrument.
The Nicarico murder is every parent's worst nightmare, one that Thomas and Patricia Nicarico have lived with for the past sixteen years. It's the kind of case that leads 75 percent of Americans to support the death penalty. For nearly as many years Rolando Cruz has lived with another kind of nightmare. On February 22, 1985, Cruz was convicted of murder, rape, deviant sexual assault, kidnapping, and burglary in the Jeanine Nicarico murder trial. Despite the fact that the police found no physical evidence linking him to the victim, a judge sentenced Cruz to die by lethal injection.
Because of a prosecutorial error, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered a second trial for Cruz, and in February of 1990 he was again found guilty and sentenced to death. That verdict was overturned in 1994.
Then, on November 3, 1995, as a third trial got under way, one of the police officers who had provided critical evidence against Cruz acknowledged that he had lied under oath. The judge ordered a directed verdict of not guilty, and Rolando Cruz, having spent nearly twelve years in jail, was a free man. The policeman's revelation alone didn't prove that Cruz was not guilty, but by then the state's case was a shambles. DNA evidence had all but eliminated Cruz as a suspect in the rape, and implicated another man, Brian Dugan, who, astonishingly, had claimed ten years earlier that he raped and killed Jeanine Nicarico.
Dugan had also confessed to five other vicious crimes, including the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl. Those confessions were credible enough for prosecutors in nearby Kane and LaSalle Counties, who used them to win Dugan's conviction and two consecutive life terms without parole.
But the state attorney for DuPage County, James Ryan, now the Illinois attorney general, was convinced that Dugan was lying, and Illinois prosecutors fought for another decade to keep Dugan's testimony out of court while they tried Cruz twice more. They continued with their case despite the resignation of one of their own detectives, who was so certain of the state's error that he had offered to testify for the defense in Cruz's first trial.
And they pressed on even after an assistant attorney general, too, resigned, protesting that the state was attempting to execute an innocent man. To date the Nicarico murder remains officially unsolved.
"The Worst Kind of Mistake" HY prosecutors were so zealous in their pursuit of Cruz has been a matter of considerable speculation. Clearly, there was enormous public and political pressure on the state attorney's office to solve the highly publicized Nicarico case; it is quite possible that the police and prosecutors became convinced of Cruz's guilt before they had accumulated the facts to prove it, and then stuck with their hunch even as the holes in their case multiplied.
Short of unimpeachable exculpatory evidence, prosecutors are loath to back away from an indictment, much less a conviction.
No doubt Cruz shares responsibility for his lengthy ordeal, because he foolishly sought to sell the police a fabricated story about the murder in exchange for a $10,000 reward, thereby injecting himself into a situation he might otherwise have avoided.
If law-enforcement officials had any doubt about Cruz's guilt, it presumably evaporated with the jury's guilty verdict in the defendant's first trial. When that verdict was set aside, prosecutors probably satisfied themselves that the court's decision turned on nothing more than a technicality. By the time Cruz's third trial rolled around, even the exculpatory DNA evidence was insufficient to shake the prosecution's belief in the rightness of its cause.
Even today the leading prosecutors and police officers in the Cruz case insist that he was involved in the crime. If Rolando Cruz were the only person ever mistakenly condemned to death in the United States, one could find any number of ways to explain his case away. But since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, in 1976, more than eighty death-row inmates have been freed from prison, their convictions overturned by evidence of innocence. That may not sound like many, given the huge U.S. prison population, but it is more than one percent of the 6,000 men and women who were sentenced to death in that same period, and equal to almost 15 percent of those actually executed -- not good odds for the defendants, given the stakes. The reasons for these miscarriages of justice range from simple police and prosecutorial error to the most outrageous misconduct, such as the framing of innocent people, and everything in between: perjured testimony, erroneous eyewitness testimony, false confessions (including the confessions of innocent defendants), racial bias, incompetent defense counsel, and overzealous police officers and prosecutors who may or may not genuinely believe they have the perpetrator of a heinous crime.