Recently in Miranda Rights Category

I read a study (Found here) that looked into why people waive their Miranda Rights. The study found that 89% of the innocent participants  waived their rights regardless of the demeanor of the interrogator. This of course makes sense if you didn't commit the crime why would you think you need to keep your mouth shut and wait for your lawyer to show up. You should keep in mind the perspective of the police though even if they are truly putting all their effort into getting the right person for a crime if you are a witness they know that you were at least involved enough to have seen something. Further it would probably be very poor investigative technique to take people at their word that they didn't do something imagine that interrogation:
"Right Mr. Smith we found the hooker's head in your fridge did you kill her?"
"No I did not."
"Really?"
"I did not kill her."
"Alright your free to go, sorry for wasting your time."

Yeah that's not going to happen the message here is of course that if your going to talk to the police exercise those rights you have. It might make you look bad in the short run, but honestly years in prison for a crime you didn't commit is going to look a whole lot worse.

Talking Tuesday in class I realized how uneducated I am when it comes to police officers. I didn't know that they could lie to no end just to get a confession or anything else we really learned Tuesday. I decided to do some research on the topic. The site I found-- i'm not sure how credible-- reinstated a lot of the things we were told in class. For the record, I LOVE police officers! In the end they do accomplish a LOT of good through their jobs. They protect those who need protecting and uphold a lot of good in the world. So keep in mind while reading this= they are doing their jobs as they were taught to do. They don't know who is truly guilty or innocent and part of their job is to decipher the differance, through whatever means.

I do NOT agree however with the sites "golden rule:" Don't trust cops. Cops are there for the better of society as a whole and we should keep that in mind. At the end of the day, cops are the good guys. Good guys that just want answers. So while this site is informative I'm choosing not to believe everything in it because it seems very opinion based to me.

I was not aware that cops do not have to read you your Miranda Rights- I was under the impression that your rights were there for you regardless, yet they can still use whatever you say against you in court. From class I know that during interrogation they can lie to get any confession possible. I had never really thought about the lie they tell when they're going to charge someone for... who knows what. They can't charge us with anything! So why have we not learned this earlier? We wait until we're 20 years old to find this stuff out. What about those who still have no idea!?

But how fair is it for a police officer to trick an innocent citizen? A citizen who believes that he or she is in good hands. A citizen who believes they are being protected, not tricked. So it should be common sense to any judge or jury that any confession given should be looked at critically because people will say anything to "help" those who are supposed to "help" us.

http://www.rense.com/general72/howto.htm

Veritaserum... Fact or Fiction?

After reading other people's posts this afternoon about lie detection, I started looking for real life chemicals that might make someone spill their secrets. Most of what I found led me to believe that truth serums are better left for pages in a science-fiction novel but I did find one article interesting, on Wikipedia of all places.

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

Granted, Wikipedia's reliability isn't the greatest but generally speaking they are good for some stuff so I am going to take their word for it for arguments sake. According to this article, there are certain chemicals that can induce people to tell the truth. These chemicals have been deemed unethical under the grounds of torture in international law however they can be used for psychiatry purposes. The reliability of these drugs are called to question in this article as it states that the drugs do not actually cause people to tell the truth, it is the fact that the people the drugs are being administered to BELIEVE that they cannot tell a lie under the influence of the drug. It also states that the drugs causes people to talk more frequently thereby releasing more information and maybe telling more truths.

I found this information very interesting especially the part about it being illegal in international law. Now I am just as much for civil liberties as the next person but I do not feel that this should fall under the guidelines as torture from an international legal standard. I suppose one could argue that in a very contrived scenario where someone is administering truth serum on a governmental figure to obtain information (let's say codes to our nuclear weapons arsenal) then YES maybe then you can view truth serum as torture (although if someone wants access to our nukes then they probably don't care about international law anyway). What do you think? Is a truth serum unethical? If so why or why not?

 

(For those that didn't get the title reference, Veritaserum is a fictional truth serum)

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/14/AR2010021404062.html

"The 23-year-old Nigerian man accused of attempting to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day was read his Miranda rights nine hours after his arrest, according to a detailed chronology released Sunday by senior administration officials. "

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/photo/postphotos/orb/asection/2010-02-15/5.htm