Actually I'm both fresh and clean Tsao. And you know that.

Shocking turn of events ITT

You're a cheap, cheap whore of a lawyer Tsao.

every criticism you and max have made has been refuted in the video. you are challenging his arguments in ways he expected and addressed in the video. like i said, if you can't understand his explanations wtf do you want me to do about it?

pretty sure this is the point my mother freaks out, drops the phone, and passes out thinking that I'm dead

If you have no involvement and are being talked to by the police then if anything such a situation being rare makes it more important not to talk to the police.

Actually no. I'm sorry you are too dense to understand this but he actually does not address any of my criticisms. That video was 48 minutes of drivel where he takes the obvious position that dumb criminals should not talk to the police and through some horrible logic and terrible reasoning tries to make it a universal rule that no one should ever cooperate with the police.

He further never gives a single example of when an innocent mentally sound person talking to the police led to them getting in trouble. For both speakers all the examples-- and they have plenty-- involved criminals who talk to the police and incriminate themselves. If it was so common for innocent people to incriminate themselves you'd think they would include at least one example but they don't. The only example they have of someone who was innocent incriminating themselves involves someone who is mentally ill.

Lastly Duane intentionally misstates the position of Justice Jackson so as to support his position when if you actually look at the statement in the context in which it was stated it does not mean what Duane wants people to believe it means. That leads to the question of is he dishonest or a moron. I'm leaning strongly toward dishonest since the misappropriate quote adds sensationalism and this video is just a desperate attempt at getting notoriety.

The correct decision might be to not cooperate but that can't be determined without knowing the particulars. I'm not advancing the position that you should cooperate but rather that the correct course of action is very much situation specific. There are situations where you should cooperate and situations where you shouldn't. There are even situations where you should initially cooperate and then stop cooperating.

It seems to me you haven't watched the video. He gives examples of innocent people inadvertently "incriminating" themselves.

No criminal defence lawyer worth a grain of salt would ever advise their clients to talk in situations where they are possible suspects (unless of course they receive an indemnity)....and I'd be 99.999% sure that would include your "professor" and his mates. When he comes on here and says he'd give that advice, then I'd believe it. In my 17 years, I've never seen a defence lawyer stupid enough to give a client that advice, and I'd like to think they'd be struck off if they did.

It seems you're never going to understand the reasoning behind this.

Can you please list one?

this is the stupidest thing said in the thread.

it takes a special combination of idiocy and hubris to believe only the "mentally ill" falsely incriminate themselves. never change, henry.

maybe but the fact its a rare situation should make you more reluctant to talk than if it was a common situation.


BTW. Its not so big an issue anymore in the UK as they fairly recently changed the rules to:

"You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence, if you fail to mention, when questioned, something which you may later rely on in court."

On the whole probably a good change but then we dont have plea bargins which is a huge reason not to talk.

Given that you're already aware of the example involving the lawyer who the police said admitted he choked the woman, I'm not sure what part of savy criminal defense attorney you think equates to 'mentally incompetent'? I can't find the part in the video (it's really frustrating I've been clicking through it for like 10 minutes and can't find it), but at some point he mentions an attorney who talks to the cops, the cops later say he said he did touch her as a joke, and he says no I never said that, and now it's his word versus the cops where if he hadn't talked to them at all they couldn't make that mistake.

2) What about the other scenario he brought up where you are riding with the cops to the station, they mention a shooter and then after the interview has started they ask you if you killed the victim and you say "No I didn't shoot anyone", they say "we didn't say shoot, we said kill" - now you are in a legal battle FOR YOUR ****ING LIFE BECAUSE YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SMARTER THAN THIS HARVARD LAW PROFESOSRAEKWNTAWKTNAWERGHAERGHO;

3) In 25% of all DNA exoneration cases the defendant had said something which caused them to be wrongly convicted. You really think 25% of all DNA exonerations are just mentally disabled people?

In context what do you think Jackson is saying?

It's been a while since I've seen that video, but isnt part two an officer on the other side of the debate opening with 'everything he said is correct?'

As I suspected, you haven't watched it...take the time to watch it rather than blindly commenting and asking others to tell you what's in it please! I'll do it this time, but not again!

He gives the example of someone who has an alibi, but a childhood friend comes forward as a witness, honestly, but mistakenly believing she saw him about a block from the crime an hour before it happened.

I could list dozens of examples from my own experiences, but you obviously are here to stir the pot, rather than genuinely learn about this basic advice all lawyers give their clients and why.

Here in Australia juries are directed by the Judge to not hold the fact that an accused exercised their right to silence against them, and that lawyers will always advise a client to do that, no matter what the circumstances. I hope that never changes.

What I tell clients is to tell the police that on legal advice, they will not be answering any questions.

Yes, it is.

I wouldn't call it a "debate".

It was more "Here's a cop to verify my statements as truth" type thing.

My only real argument with the Prof is the insinuation that tends to creep between the lines during his whole segment that the police don't really care who they convict, which the cop dealt with when he said what every cop watching that video was thinking, which was "I don't want to put anybody innocent in jail. I try not to bring innocent people into the interview room."

I never said only the mentally ill falsely incriminate themselves. I said the only example in that video of an innocent person who falsely incriminated himself involved a mentally ill person.

If you actually had nothing to do with a crime it is difficult to incriminate yourself. If you have a bad cop who for whatever reason is determined to railroad you that will be quickly apparent and at that point you are free to stop cooperating.

The situation is rare was brought up more as a support of why it is often talked of as a universal rule -- most people are involved and people who are involved should almost never talk.

I do agree that a rare situation is a red flag that something has gone wrong but that doesn't mean the best course of action is adversarial. I'm certainly not advocating for trust the police to fix the situation or to show no caution and just do what they say unquestioning.

One-third of the 25% were juveniles or mentally handicapped. Another twenty-two pled guilty. It says here that the mentally competent are prone to confessing due to exhaustion or miscalculation that they'll confess now and sort it out in court later.

So yes, it happens, but it doesn't arise from simply talking to cops.

Yes but he then only really talked about the problems of guilty people talking and its pretty obbvious they should keep their mouths shut.

Seems to me that an analysis of this data would tell us all we need to know. Is anything available?

Seems we have 289 exonerations. Do we know how many potential exonerations there were?

Possible culprit? "About 70 percent of those exonerated by DNA testing are members of minority groups." Searching for what states these souls happen to be in... found it. 15% in Texas alone. 23% in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida combined.


What do you mean by potential exonerations?


Edit, this is a map of convictions caused by false confessions. I counted 77 total. Most states are between one and five, but New York has 12 and Illinois 23(!). 24 or 25 were, statistically, unwell or underage when they confessed, so 53 confessions given under other circumstances, which, again, IP attributes to the length/intensity of interrogation or a misjudgement on the part of the confessor.

One in 50,000 people in prison today are there because of a false confession. And that's just the convicted, so not counting the acquitted who at some point said something incriminating.

That's bad, but I wouldn't take 53 cases to mean that you can never talk to a cop lest you be thrown in prison forever because you said something incriminating about an offence you are innocent of.

Ummm...not all Police are as honest as the gentleman in the video. And some are honest, but get it seriously wrong. You can bet that the average jury doesn't want to send someone away for crimes they didn't commit, but history tells us it's happened many times before (look at the DNA Innocence Project)....honest mistake, with devastating consequences for the Accused. Sometimes even the Prosecutors don't care if they convict innocent people (remember your lacrosse players case?).

289 out of how many? If its out of 500 that's very different to if its out of 500,000. A potential exoneration would be a case where critical DNA evidence was examined after conviction.

I'd also like to see the best case against Henry. Can we get the best example of an innocent mentally capable adult who was exonerated after incriminating themselves?

Except we have no reason to believe the lawyer was innocent -- the professor admits as much. He got convicted because he told the police he chocked the women but that it was a joke and then recanted that. So that is not an example of an innocent person incriminating himself unless you subscribe to the belief that the cop choose to frame the lawyer.

It is a ******ed argument to claim the police officer make the mistake of hearing I chocked her as a joke if the lawyer didn't actually say it. That is not an option.

There are only two possibilities --

1) The by far most likely scenario is that the lawyer actually did say that he chocked her as a joke because he actually did chock her and at the time he thought making it out as innocent was his best defence. That would be a guilty person incriminating themselves

2) The police officer is lying because he intentionally wants to frame this guy. If that is the case then speaking or not speaking is irrelevant. If a cop wants to frame you and is willing to lie he can just make up that you spoke to him.

As cres already pointed out this is easily dealt with by the fact that we all have recording devices on us 24-7.

That was a fake hypothetical he gave to the audience. It was a stupid test where at the beginning of the lecture he mentioned gang-style killing and then changed it to shooting and asked how many people were shot. People raised there hands when he said three and he cried Gotcha I never said anything about shooting only that it was a gang-style killing. It is a low point in the presentation much like you claiming a badly constructed social experiment was an example of something that actually happened in the real world.

He is not a Harvard professor. He is a Regent University professor. He got his degree from Harvard but he teaches at a school that is barely accredited.

If you look at studies of false confessions you'll find that it is highly correlated with exceptionally low intelligence.

The context is a case where an individual was denied council for four days while he was interrogated. The Justice's statement is made in that context of the admissibility of a confession that was obtained while the individual's right to council was violated. What the Justice is saying is that if the suspect had his rights respected he would have been given council who would have certainly advised him to not speak to the police and that advice would have impacted the suspect's behaviour. The only reason that the confession was obtained was because the individual's rights were not respected and as such the State can not benefit. The Justice's statement is a description of how events would have unfolded in a situation and not the wholehearted endorsement of Duane's doctrine.

I thought of this thread at like 2 am last night when I came to a traffic stop out in the middle of nowhere. I had my license and registration ready, and the dude just kind of looked at me like I was Osama Bin Laden for a solid 30-40 seconds or so and then started asking me a bunch of questions like where was I coming from and if I had been drinking and all this. I was coming from a friend's house, and I don't drink, and those are the answers I gave him. I think he was trying to Jedi mind trick me or something because he asked me where I had came from honestly like 4-5 times in a row in different ways, but he wasn't very good at trying to trick me or whatever he was trying to do. After that, he had another 30 second pause staring at my license and then just handed it back to me and waved me on.

Then again I think he was just bored. Should I have plead the fif or should I have just told him where I was coming from?