Professor Duane is back with a new interview on the Fifth Amendment:
His argument, which he’s since expanded into a new book called You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, is that even if you haven’t committed a crime, it’s dangerous to tell the police any information. You might make mistakes when explaining where you were at the time of a crime that the police interpret as lies; the officer talking to you could misremember what you say much later; you may be tricked into saying the wrong things by cops under no obligation to tell you the truth; and your statements to police could, in combination with faulty eyewitness accounts, shoddy “expert” testimony, and sheer bad luck, lead to you being convicted of a serious crime.
He further details the treacherous territory Americans are in with respect to their right to remain silent:
Up until about five years ago, lawyers would give out business cards to their client and say, “Read this to the police,” and it’d say, “At the advice of my attorney I decline to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me, I’m invoking the Fifth Amendment.” And there wasn’t a lot of soul-searching and agonizing that went into all of this, because as long as the jury never finds out that you took the Fifth, it’s a perfectly sensible solution. But the tide turned three years ago in 2013 with this wretched, abominable decision by the Supreme Court in Salinas v. Texas that changed everything.
In the Salinas case, a young man was interrogated by the police, and when they asked him a bunch of questions that didn’t seem to be very threatening, he took the bait and answered them all. Then all of the sudden, they [asked a question that made it] obvious they wanted information that might expose him to criminal prosecution, and he just got silent. He didn’t say a word. And there’s no doubt that he was exercising his Fifth Amendment privilege, but he didn’t [formally] assert his Fifth Amendment privilege. So the five Republican [appointees] on the Supreme Court said, Because you didn’t tell the police that you were using your Fifth Amendment privilege, your exercise of the privilege, or your decision to remain silent can be used against you as evidence of guilt. Which probably had a dozen Supreme Court justices rolling over in their grave.
The game has changed now that your choice to use the Fifth Amendment privilege can be used against you at trial depending exactly how and where you do it. As I explain in the book, now the problem is, if you’re kind of clumsy about the way you assert the Fifth Amendment, you’re running a lot of different risks.
He was my evidence professor and here is the lecture which got it all started:
