You Have the Right to Remain Innocent Kindle Edition

“Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances.” – U.S. Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson“…In almost every group there is at least one person who tells me that his father is a state trooper or that his mother is a prosecutor. Every time this happens, without exception, the student in question has told me basically the same thing: ‘My parents explained to me that if I were ever approached by a law enforcement officer, I was to call them immediately, and they made sure that I would never agree to talk to the police.” (or search their apartment or car or…)So begins You Have the Right to Remain Innocent by Constitutional law professor James Duane.It is a small (paperback size) book with only 137 pages, but a lesser writer could have easily stretched this out to a full-sized book of 500 pages. The gist of the book is this: don’t talk to the police because a) police lie, b) prosecutors are corrupt, and c) judges are often incompetent and biased. Duane gives example after example after example of how people were convicted by simply talking to the police, even if they were innocent—particularly if they were innocent. There are 140 end notes for the 140 examples in this short book of people who were convicted because they talked to the police. Even when they were innocent and had air-tight alibis. Don’t think it can happen? It can, and it has, over and over.You are probably asking yourself, “If I’m innocent, and I have an iron-clad alibi, how can me telling the police I was somewhere else and I can prove it hurt me?” Believe me, it can, and it has. It can be used against you to convict you. Why? Because the police lie, prosecutors lie and hide evidence, and expert witnesses can lie, may be incompetent, or can change their stories/testimonies. One young man was in the middle of a jury trial on his way to death row for murdering a (missing) girl when—luckily—the girl was located by the defense and presented. She had just run away with her boyfriend. Thousands more innocent people have been incarcerated, some for decades, because of our corrupt legal system (it is not a justice system).The cops don’t care, the prosecutors don’t care, the judges don’t care, and the jury tends to believe the police over defendants.Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Unit, refused to talk when she was summoned before a congressional committee under oath, but she, and her law enforcement minions and prosecutors, made careers out of trying to force other people to talk. What does that tell you? Cops will tell you to “do the right thing,” and then tell their own kids the exact opposite.There is so much from the book that I would like to write here, but obviously I’m limited, so I’ll leave you with one thing. In Mississippi a judge basically ridiculed a defendant because he should have known that the police cannot be trusted.Not every cop is dishonest, but even honest cops can make a mistake or misremember something. Don’t give them any ammunition to use against you, because it will be.

In the world governed by this administration, congress, and SCOTUS, this short book can be the difference in how and where American citizens live their lives.It is urgent that the innocent know the way that the justice system works and how to protect themselves from it's errant or intentional misuse.It should be required reading in schools.

The book is a short, easy read which is well written, and I think valuable for anyone living in America. I found it a valuable read even after watching the video Duane became famous for, and strongly recommend it.Since the basic thesis of the book is stated in its title, which is also a reasonably summary of the book's actionable advice, it is reasonable to ask what is in the book which justifies opening the book to look at its pages. There's actually a lot.The book does starts with some caveats, perhaps most notably that he clarifies he's talking about speaking with the police when they come to you, unsolicited, to ask you questions about the past. It is both a legal requirement and good sense to readily comply with the request to identify yourself and explain what you are doing in the moment, where you currently are. One of his examples is if you are breaking into your own house because you locked yourself out and a policeman asks you what you are doing, do tell him that this is your house and you don't have your key. He mentions some other cases when you must talk with the police.The other very notable caveat is that he takes some pains to point out that every member of society owes a great debt to the men and women who serve as police, who take personal risk to do a difficult job that keeps us safe. Throughout the book, he makes it clear that he isn't talking about bad people, but (in the main) good people in a bad situation, which is the present criminal legal system in the United States. It is a system which sometimes convicts innocent people along with guilty people, and for reasons he makes clear throughout the book, his primary concern is giving innocent people the tools needed to avoid the pitfalls of this dangerous system. Good people make mistakes, and the mistake of a police officer or a prosecutor or a judge can cost an innocent person decades in prison. (He uses more than a few cases where the person convicted was later conclusively proved innocent by DNA evidence (often decades later) to show how wrong things can go for innocent people.)The book has more than a few interesting insights into problems with the criminal justice system—perhaps most notably being the way that no living person has any idea even how many crimes are defined by the law, let alone what they all are—but I think its greatest value lies in the examination of particular cases where he goes on to show how even very trivial statements, which are true, can become damning evidence in light of other things which a person may not know and has no control over. The case where a man admitted to having dated a woman some time before the crime he was convicted of happened, in the neighborhood where that crime happened, helped to send a man later exonerated by DNA evidence to prison. Coincidences happen, but not all juries believe that they do.And it is this sort of thing which is the main value of reading the entire book, I think. It is so very easy to slip into the mindset of wanting to give into the urge to cooperate, to be helpful, to be willing to answer any question which is not directly incriminating (and if I'm innocent, how could any question be directly incriminating?) which takes more than a little beating down by seeing over and over again how even minor admissions of completely true and innocent things can be disastrous. The book presents information, but I think equally reading it constitutes training. If one were ever to face a police interview it would be a very stressful situation, and when stressed we tend to forget what we know and fall back on our habitual reactions. Only through training ourselves by seeing many situations we could all too easily be in is it likely that we will remember to do what we should.The final two chapters of the book, which are much shorter than the first, deal with the specifics of how to go about exercising one's right to remain innocent in a practical sense. He covers many instances of how people have accidentally incriminated themselves when invoking their fifth amendment right, as well as how people have accidentally failed at refusing to talk to the police and asking for a lawyer. And again, it's not so much knowing what to do that's the real benefit of reading this book, but learning what not to do, and why not to do it.