12 ms·

This is kind of a myth. That was only part of the reasoning. The suspect actually said: "If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I

by wisty 5y ago

This is kind of a myth. That was only part of the reasoning. The suspect actually said: "If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it so why don’t you just give me a lawyer (dog) cause this is not what’s up." Is he actually requesting a lawyer? Maybe, or maybe he's saying he's innocent and asserting that he will defend himself (getting a lawyer) if charged. The police aren't required to execute subroutines either. You can't say "give me a lawyer if you think I'm guilty" or "give me a lawyer if Bobby was the snitch" or "give me a lawyer if the Collatz conjecture is true" (well you can, but they don't have to give you a lawyer then). You have to unambiguously ask for a lawyer if you want one. And he's saying it's how he feels. He says he feels he should get a lawyer if they think he's guilty. This is not a clear request for a lawyer.

lupire 5y ago
That's because this person is not expert in law and the police exploited that. The intent was obvious.
- avs733 5y ago
  and the courts choose to be party to this, and there is no consequence.
metadat 5y ago
The point is, if someone being accused of or investigated for a crime and they say ".*Lawyer.*", in the United States this should automatically trigger the police to stop talking to the suspect until the attorney is present.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  >this should automatically trigger I agree, should. But ruling precedent by judges has said otherwise, that the request for a lawyer must be clear and unambiguous. It should not be a question, speculation about the need for a lawyer, "I think I need to..". Yes, this is unfortunate. Especially considering the way the US very broadly interprets rights under other amendments, yet so very narrowly in the case of the 6th amendment.
  - avs733 5y ago
    which is the (great great?) grand parents point ... laws not being reasonably applied.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I'd go a step further and make it explicitly opt-out. How confident is the average person on exactly what point they are entitled to a lawyer?
  - kingcharles 5y ago
    It essentially is in a couple of states now.
- wisty 5y ago
  So we should discriminate against the people who don't know to say "lawyer"? Why not just give every suspect a lawyer immediately. And since any sane suspect will listen to their lawyer (who will advise them to plead the 5th), why not ban police from interviewing suspects altogether, and simply give a list of questions to their lawyer to discuss.
  - vouwfietsman 5y ago
    Exactly! we should! By giving everyone a lawyer immediately we focus on establishing truth. Only reason we don't is that its obviously too expensive and impractical. This is why we initially try without, and involve a lawyer when "it gets serious". So consider this: Why should the suspect be punished for this reality?
ineedasername 5y ago
This, unfortunately, correct (In the US). A request for a lawyer must be completely unambiguous. If there is any ambiguity, and you then continue talking to the police, a court has a decent chance of ruling against you on the issue of whether or not you requested a lawyer. Speculating that you should get a lawyer, asking the police if a lawyer is necessary, asking if you can have a lawyer... those are not sufficient to guarantee that your rights are protected. There should be no question about what you want. It needs to be assertive, declarative. There's no single magic phrase, but something like "I am invoking my right to legal counsel and will not answer any further questions". And then don't answer anything. Don't even ask anything related to the legal issue at hand. So, the above comment is not necessarily stating their own opinion on how things should work. It is describing how things actually work in practice. Zero ambiguity.
- wisty 5y ago
  Why is it unfortunate? Is it unfortunate that some people will get away with crimes, because they know to ask for a lawyer (unambiguously)? The "lawyer dog" suspect was found guilty of a serious crime (based on his interview with police), and I think he should have been convicted, and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality (at least in this specific case). Or is it unfortunate that some people will be wrongfully convicted, because they didn't have a lawyer and said something which ended up making them (falsely) look guilty? I suspect people will think it's a combination of the two - both false convictions exist, and some criminals get off because they know the system. But making it easier to get a lawyer will only fix one of these. There has to be some balance. If the police can only convict based on physical evidence (and not suspect interviews) then a lot of crimes will be impossible to prosecute.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    > and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality This phrasing is like identity theft, it puts the burden on the wrong party. Had he not been convicted, it would be because the state failed to successfully prosecute him by not giving him a fair trial. A system where evidence obtained illegally is admissible in court creates a perverse incentive for police to collect evidence illegally and suffer the suffer the consequences of that in order to get a conviction. You have to take away the value to eliminate the incentive. Imagine a world where where theft was punishable by 2 years in jail but you got to keep whatever money you stole.
IggleSniggle 5y ago
I honestly don’t understand how you can read that and not interpret it as a clear request for a lawyer. It takes mental gymnastics to assume that he did not, in fact, want a lawyer.
- drewcoo 5y ago
  No, it takes "subroutines."
  - Spivak 5y ago
    I don't really think so, I think it's completely unambiguous that "if you think I did it" means "if you actually go through with arresting me." Like it's nuts that the court system rewards deliberate misunderstandings of someone's intent.
  - romwell 5y ago
    Oh sure, and the phrase "Why don't you get me a lawyer" is not a request, but a question, the answer to which the police isn't obligated to provide. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The only relevant part is that the words "get me a lawyer" were said, and these words mean - hear me for a second here - that the person in question requested a lawyer.
ineptech 5y ago
I don't buy this for a second. "If you think I did it" is clearly a preliminary clause akin to "If that's the way it's going to be," not the beginning of an if-then clause. But the point here is that there shouldn't be such a test in the first place. "If y'all think I did it" was him (belatedly) realizing that he was a suspect, after the police put on a kabuki-show of pretending that he wasn't, which they are trained to do, specifically to get suspects to talk without asking for a lawyer. The whole thing is a farce. "It's okay to screw him because technically he didn't quite do the thing that we intentionally put in place to let us screw people more" is the sort of claim that's wrong even when it's right, because it's so very far removed from a genuine attempt to discover the truth of the matter.
- wisty 5y ago
  The police "screwed" him by following the exact letter of the law as they questioned him, and didn't give him the "get out of jail free" card that he almost managed to get. And while it's not totally relevant, he was hardly just some kid with a joint on the floor of his car (it was a serious violent offense). Yes, the police sailed a bit close to the wind. But maybe the law is currently too suspect-friendly in the USA (which then is compensated with extreme penalties for the tiny number of suspects who are found guilty in a trial). The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining). And while it's easy to just blame the "law and order" crowd, they're partly just reacting to the fact that it's almost impossible to fairly convict a savvy criminal in the US without physical evidence or multiple witnesses. In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional (if you know the cheat codes). I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent, but police or prosecutor can tell the jury which questions you did not answer (and then the lawyers will argue over why that was the case). The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview. If the purpose of legal systems is to "discover the truth of the matter", then I think the US does a poor job (making it far too easy for a smart criminal to simply shut down a case against them), and a lot of the disfunction they have seems to be an attempt to compensate for all the rights that a smarter criminal can have.
  - 5y ago
emodendroket 5y ago
Come on. That's a willful misinterpretation, for one thing, and for the other, the judge specifically said that it was not clear what a "lawyer-dog" was. You are trying to come up with a more rational explanation post hoc when the judge himself gave the stupid one. https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf > In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
- wisty 5y ago
  The link is dead for me, were you able to read it? But this seems this is more of the ruling, note that the judge points out 'prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it' > I agree with the Court's decision to deny the defendant's writ application and write separately to spotlight the very important constitutional issue regarding the invocation of counsel during a law enforcement interview. The defendant voluntarily agreed to be interviewed twice regarding his alleged sexual misconduct with minors. At both interviews detectives advised the defendant of his Miranda rights and the defendant stated he understood and waived those rights. Nonetheless, the defendant argues he invoked his right to counsel. And the basis for this comes from the second interview, where I believe the defendant ambiguously referenced a lawyer—prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up." > As this Court has written, "[i]f a suspect makes a reference to an attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable police officer in light of the circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking his right to counsel, the cessation of questioning is not required." State v. Payne, 2001-3196, p. 10 (La. 12/4/02), 833 So.2d 927, 935 (citations omitted and emphasis in original); see also Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 462, 114 S.Ct. 2350, 2357, 129 L.Ed.2d 362 (1994) (agreeing with the lower courts' conclusion that the statement "[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer" is not an unambiguous request for a lawyer). > In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a "lawyer dog" does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).
lozenge 5y ago
If somebody under questioning, in a situation where people often request and have rights to lawyers, mentions a lawyer, what's the correct action? A) consider whether the person might be requesting a lawyer and help them exercise their constitutional right. B) find some way, any way, to interpret their request as something else. Apparently the police thought he wanted a "lawyer dog"? Come off it. Rights are only real if people can exercise them. This court decision decimated the right to a defense in every meaningful sense.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Willful misinterpretation is precisely what any self-preserving legalistic person or system will do. In a situation like this, they'll choose B, because if they don't, they are choosing to lose in the face of an inconvenient truth.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
You could run that through a group of kindergartners and 30/30 would tell you he requested a lawyer. It’s only a person with a special kind of learned stupidity, or malice that can claim that they are not sure if it was a request for a lawyer. Reminds me of the “what is a photocopier” dialogue: https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE
HWR_14 5y ago
I find the phrase you quoted as unambiguously asking for a lawyer, and it takes motivated reading (or an inability to imagine other speech patterns) to arrive at any other answer. And, for fun, in serval US circuits the suspect would have been asking for a lawyer. Adding qualifiers is usually a linguistic filler, not attempting to add more information. Other phrasings also considered not to ask for a lawyer by the courts under the same standard are: "I think I need a lawyer", "is there a lawyer I can speak with" and "where's my lawyer". Do you really think those weren't clearly asking for a lawyer, and really were expressing unacted on thought, question about the general availability of lawyers or asking the cops to report on the location of his attorney as a completely isolated question?
romwell 5y ago
If you really want to be this facetious and go into sentence structures, bear with me: The "if" clause does not apply to the request to get a lawyer. >If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it He knows he didn't do it if they all think they he'd done it. This is followed by a request do get a lawyer. Are we done now?
IncRnd 5y ago
A native English speaker would understand the sentence - in the same way that saying, "give me a lawyer Stan" can be easily understood. The person in that sentence isn't asking for a "lawyer Stan" but is naming the other person in the conversation as "Stan" or in this case as "dawg". For a police officer, who regularly deals with this sort of slang, to misunderstand this - that only happens when they want to intentionally violate the rights of the accused.

by wisty 5y ago

lupire 5y ago

That's because this person is not expert in law and the police exploited that. The intent was obvious.

avs733 5y ago
and the courts choose to be party to this, and there is no consequence.

metadat 5y ago

The point is, if someone being accused of or investigated for a crime and they say ".*Lawyer.*", in the United States this should automatically trigger the police to stop talking to the suspect until the attorney is present.

ineedasername 5y ago
>this should automatically trigger I agree, should. But ruling precedent by judges has said otherwise, that the request for a lawyer must be clear and unambiguous. It should not be a question, speculation about the need for a lawyer, "I think I need to..". Yes, this is unfortunate. Especially considering the way the US very broadly interprets rights under other amendments, yet so very narrowly in the case of the 6th amendment.
- avs733 5y ago
  which is the (great great?) grand parents point ... laws not being reasonably applied.
Talanes 5y ago
I'd go a step further and make it explicitly opt-out. How confident is the average person on exactly what point they are entitled to a lawyer?
- kingcharles 5y ago
  It essentially is in a couple of states now.
wisty 5y ago
So we should discriminate against the people who don't know to say "lawyer"? Why not just give every suspect a lawyer immediately. And since any sane suspect will listen to their lawyer (who will advise them to plead the 5th), why not ban police from interviewing suspects altogether, and simply give a list of questions to their lawyer to discuss.
- vouwfietsman 5y ago
  Exactly! we should! By giving everyone a lawyer immediately we focus on establishing truth. Only reason we don't is that its obviously too expensive and impractical. This is why we initially try without, and involve a lawyer when "it gets serious". So consider this: Why should the suspect be punished for this reality?

ineedasername 5y ago

This, unfortunately, correct (In the US). A request for a lawyer must be completely unambiguous. If there is any ambiguity, and you then continue talking to the police, a court has a decent chance of ruling against you on the issue of whether or not you requested a lawyer. Speculating that you should get a lawyer, asking the police if a lawyer is necessary, asking if you can have a lawyer... those are not sufficient to guarantee that your rights are protected. There should be no question about what you want. It needs to be assertive, declarative. There's no single magic phrase, but something like "I am invoking my right to legal counsel and will not answer any further questions". And then don't answer anything. Don't even ask anything related to the legal issue at hand. So, the above comment is not necessarily stating their own opinion on how things should work. It is describing how things actually work in practice. Zero ambiguity.

wisty 5y ago
Why is it unfortunate? Is it unfortunate that some people will get away with crimes, because they know to ask for a lawyer (unambiguously)? The "lawyer dog" suspect was found guilty of a serious crime (based on his interview with police), and I think he should have been convicted, and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality (at least in this specific case). Or is it unfortunate that some people will be wrongfully convicted, because they didn't have a lawyer and said something which ended up making them (falsely) look guilty? I suspect people will think it's a combination of the two - both false convictions exist, and some criminals get off because they know the system. But making it easier to get a lawyer will only fix one of these. There has to be some balance. If the police can only convict based on physical evidence (and not suspect interviews) then a lot of crimes will be impossible to prosecute.
- Spivak 5y ago
  > and that it's good that he didn't get off on a technicality This phrasing is like identity theft, it puts the burden on the wrong party. Had he not been convicted, it would be because the state failed to successfully prosecute him by not giving him a fair trial. A system where evidence obtained illegally is admissible in court creates a perverse incentive for police to collect evidence illegally and suffer the suffer the consequences of that in order to get a conviction. You have to take away the value to eliminate the incentive. Imagine a world where where theft was punishable by 2 years in jail but you got to keep whatever money you stole.

IggleSniggle 5y ago

I honestly don’t understand how you can read that and not interpret it as a clear request for a lawyer. It takes mental gymnastics to assume that he did not, in fact, want a lawyer.

drewcoo 5y ago
No, it takes "subroutines."
- Spivak 5y ago
  I don't really think so, I think it's completely unambiguous that "if you think I did it" means "if you actually go through with arresting me." Like it's nuts that the court system rewards deliberate misunderstandings of someone's intent.
- romwell 5y ago
  Oh sure, and the phrase "Why don't you get me a lawyer" is not a request, but a question, the answer to which the police isn't obligated to provide. Sorry, I'm not buying it. The only relevant part is that the words "get me a lawyer" were said, and these words mean - hear me for a second here - that the person in question requested a lawyer.

ineptech 5y ago

I don't buy this for a second. "If you think I did it" is clearly a preliminary clause akin to "If that's the way it's going to be," not the beginning of an if-then clause. But the point here is that there shouldn't be such a test in the first place. "If y'all think I did it" was him (belatedly) realizing that he was a suspect, after the police put on a kabuki-show of pretending that he wasn't, which they are trained to do, specifically to get suspects to talk without asking for a lawyer. The whole thing is a farce. "It's okay to screw him because technically he didn't quite do the thing that we intentionally put in place to let us screw people more" is the sort of claim that's wrong even when it's right, because it's so very far removed from a genuine attempt to discover the truth of the matter.

wisty 5y ago
The police "screwed" him by following the exact letter of the law as they questioned him, and didn't give him the "get out of jail free" card that he almost managed to get. And while it's not totally relevant, he was hardly just some kid with a joint on the floor of his car (it was a serious violent offense). Yes, the police sailed a bit close to the wind. But maybe the law is currently too suspect-friendly in the USA (which then is compensated with extreme penalties for the tiny number of suspects who are found guilty in a trial). The US system is such a mess that the police and suspects basically conspire to avoid it (plea bargaining). And while it's easy to just blame the "law and order" crowd, they're partly just reacting to the fact that it's almost impossible to fairly convict a savvy criminal in the US without physical evidence or multiple witnesses. In most of the world, police interrogations aren't optional (if you know the cheat codes). I believe that in the UK, Canada, Australia you have the right to remain silent, but police or prosecutor can tell the jury which questions you did not answer (and then the lawyers will argue over why that was the case). The right to council is often for the trial, not telling you how to avoid answering questions during a police interview. If the purpose of legal systems is to "discover the truth of the matter", then I think the US does a poor job (making it far too easy for a smart criminal to simply shut down a case against them), and a lot of the disfunction they have seems to be an attempt to compensate for all the rights that a smarter criminal can have.
- 5y ago

emodendroket 5y ago

Come on. That's a willful misinterpretation, for one thing, and for the other, the judge specifically said that it was not clear what a "lawyer-dog" was. You are trying to come up with a more rational explanation post hoc when the judge himself gave the stupid one. https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf https://www.lasc.org/opinions/2017/17KK0954.sjc.addconc.pdf > In my view, the defendant’s ambiguous and equivocal reference to a “lawyer dog” does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).

wisty 5y ago
The link is dead for me, were you able to read it? But this seems this is more of the ruling, note that the judge points out 'prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it' > I agree with the Court's decision to deny the defendant's writ application and write separately to spotlight the very important constitutional issue regarding the invocation of counsel during a law enforcement interview. The defendant voluntarily agreed to be interviewed twice regarding his alleged sexual misconduct with minors. At both interviews detectives advised the defendant of his Miranda rights and the defendant stated he understood and waived those rights. Nonetheless, the defendant argues he invoked his right to counsel. And the basis for this comes from the second interview, where I believe the defendant ambiguously referenced a lawyer—prefacing that statement with "if y' all, this is how I feel, if y' all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up." > As this Court has written, "[i]f a suspect makes a reference to an attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable police officer in light of the circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking his right to counsel, the cessation of questioning is not required." State v. Payne, 2001-3196, p. 10 (La. 12/4/02), 833 So.2d 927, 935 (citations omitted and emphasis in original); see also Davis v. United States, 512 U.S. 452, 462, 114 S.Ct. 2350, 2357, 129 L.Ed.2d 362 (1994) (agreeing with the lower courts' conclusion that the statement "[m]aybe I should talk to a lawyer" is not an unambiguous request for a lawyer). > In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a "lawyer dog" does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview and does not violate Edwards v. Arizona, 451 U.S. 477, 101 S.Ct. 1880, 68 L.Ed.2d 378 (1981).

lozenge 5y ago

If somebody under questioning, in a situation where people often request and have rights to lawyers, mentions a lawyer, what's the correct action? A) consider whether the person might be requesting a lawyer and help them exercise their constitutional right. B) find some way, any way, to interpret their request as something else. Apparently the police thought he wanted a "lawyer dog"? Come off it. Rights are only real if people can exercise them. This court decision decimated the right to a defense in every meaningful sense.

JetAlone 5y ago
Willful misinterpretation is precisely what any self-preserving legalistic person or system will do. In a situation like this, they'll choose B, because if they don't, they are choosing to lose in the face of an inconvenient truth.

isitmadeofglass 5y ago

You could run that through a group of kindergartners and 30/30 would tell you he requested a lawyer. It’s only a person with a special kind of learned stupidity, or malice that can claim that they are not sure if it was a request for a lawyer. Reminds me of the “what is a photocopier” dialogue: https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE https://youtu.be/PZbqAMEwtOE

HWR_14 5y ago

I find the phrase you quoted as unambiguously asking for a lawyer, and it takes motivated reading (or an inability to imagine other speech patterns) to arrive at any other answer. And, for fun, in serval US circuits the suspect would have been asking for a lawyer. Adding qualifiers is usually a linguistic filler, not attempting to add more information. Other phrasings also considered not to ask for a lawyer by the courts under the same standard are: "I think I need a lawyer", "is there a lawyer I can speak with" and "where's my lawyer". Do you really think those weren't clearly asking for a lawyer, and really were expressing unacted on thought, question about the general availability of lawyers or asking the cops to report on the location of his attorney as a completely isolated question?

romwell 5y ago

If you really want to be this facetious and go into sentence structures, bear with me: The "if" clause does not apply to the request to get a lawyer. >If y’all, this is how I feel, if y’all think I did it, I know that I didn’t do it He knows he didn't do it if they all think they he'd done it. This is followed by a request do get a lawyer. Are we done now?

IncRnd 5y ago

A native English speaker would understand the sentence - in the same way that saying, "give me a lawyer Stan" can be easily understood. The person in that sentence isn't asking for a "lawyer Stan" but is naming the other person in the conversation as "Stan" or in this case as "dawg". For a police officer, who regularly deals with this sort of slang, to misunderstand this - that only happens when they want to intentionally violate the rights of the accused.