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These three paragraphs also seem important: “It is crucial to note that affirmatively declining to discuss the investigation in the absence of counsel is not t
by ugh 15y ago
These three paragraphs also seem important:
“It is crucial to note that affirmatively declining to discuss the investigation in the absence of counsel is not the same thing as remaining completely silent. If you are not in custody, your total silence, especially in the face of an accusation, can very possibly be used against you as an adoptive admission under the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Your invocation of counsel, however, cannot be used against you at trial. United States v. McDonald , 620 F.2d 559, 561-64 (5th Cir. 1980). Your refusal to talk substance in the absence of counsel will force the prosecutor to decide whether your information is important enough to justify a grand jury subpoena for your testimony.
If the prosecutor responds to your declination by serving you with a grand jury subpoena, this will present you with an interesting range of options such as: 1) testifying; 2) refusing to testify, by invoking the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, which broadly applies to anyone , innocent or guilty, facing criminal exposure; 3) testifying (or talking to the government) only after receiving a grant of immunity; or 4) proffering to the government–that is, giving them a sneak preview of what you will tell them if they agree to grant you immunity. The important thing to remember is that declining to speak to the agent in the first place buys you time in which to weigh these alternative strategies with your white-collar criminal defense attorney.”
There are no downsides when you decline to talk, it gives you time to take a more considered approach and you can avoid errors you might make in the heat of the moment (when you are most likely stressed and maybe even panicked).
I will always decline answering questions, no matter the situation. There might be situations where talking is unproblematic but I don’t want to make that decision on the spot and when I’m stressed. I doubt my abilities to make right decisions in those situations. That’s why I made that decision now, and it’s to take the safest route: I decline.
- Natsu 15y agoYou've both missed the most damning sentence in the entire document: To begin with, you are not qualified to know whether you are innocent of wrongdoing under federal criminal law. That's what ought to keep people awake at night.
- Florin_Andrei 15y agoIf the law was computer software, at this point it would be a giant unmanageable screwball of spaghetti code that would crash daily and would require patches 3 times a week.
- jbooth 15y agoIt does, both of those. Except the patches are driven by lobbyist donations or ideological axe grinding rather than fixing defects, for the most part.
- duggan 15y agoSo it's exactly like software then :)
- InclinedPlane 15y agoIt's worse than that, if the law were software then it wouldn't even run on client machines, it'd only run on specialty hardware in the lab.
- thehotdon 15y agoif ... 1000 dollar fine else if ... 5 months jail else if ... capital punishment else if ... licence suspended else if ... 3 years jail, 20000 dollar fine // handle a few million more cases else you're innocent
- intellection 15y agoProgrammatically human law may lose ourselves, insofar conceptualizing reasonability. How might IT giveth direct feel? /end upvote
- marginalboy 15y agoCould that just mean that "ignorance of the law is no defense"?
- crenshaw 15y agoThere are no downsides when you decline to talk Doesn't the highlighted section actually note that silence can be used against you? It would seem you need to decline to talk and request counsel, if I understood correctly.
- Mithrandir 15y agoYou have the right to ask for your attorney. If you don't say anything, that might be used against you.
- prof_hobart 15y ago>There are no downsides when you decline to talk, Whilst I understand the principle, I'm not sure I 100% agree with this statement. I've been in a few situations in the past - demos/football matches etc - where declining to talk would quite likely have resulted in me being detained for questioning (and in some of those cases, for others who tried this approach, this was exactly what happened), but a polite answer to the cops resulted in them simply leaving me alone. It's true that had the cops decided to nick me anyway, then anything I said could well have resulted in bigger problems than if I'd kept quite. But they didn't. In my view, there are quite definitely some downsides to refusing to talk, but they are far lower than the downsides could be by talking.
- rue 15y agoThe police isn't the same as a federal agent, although it's best to avoid talking to them too.
- prof_hobart 15y agoAh. I'm British, so I'm not really aware of there being a difference (at least one of my "talking my way out of trouble" incidents happened when I was working in Texas though - but it wasn't a federal agent).