Regardless of why, people posted this video so often that I thought I should point out that the central premise is wrong.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Either Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
If your rule is that you don't want to hear contradictions like that pointed out, unless it's done by a law professor, maybe the problem is with your rule?
Anyway, I'm not assuming the police or judges are trustworthy at all. I'm just saying that if they're corrupt, the Fifth doesn't help you.
Suppose you're innocent and either the cops or the judge asks you, "Did you do it?" With the Fifth, you refuse to answer. Without the Fifth, you say No.
At that point, you're in the same boat either way. If they fabricate enough evidence to convict you, the Fifth doesn't help you. If the cops haul you away and beat you up until you sign a confession, and then tell the court that you signed the confession of your own free will, the Fifth didn't help you either -- because the cops will just say that you voluntarily waived your Fifth Amendment rights and signed the confession anyway.
The challenge I posed in the first article was: Come up with a specific scenario where the outcome is different depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. The scenarios above fail that test. Most of the other scenarios people have proposed, also fail that test. You can assume the government is corrupt, you just still have to show that the Fifth would affect the outcome somehow even if the government is corrupt.
I don't see why, in the subject at hand, we should take his opinion over an experienced law professors, or even an ex-police officer's opinion.
The professor and the cop are saying opposite things, whether they realized it or not, and that's what people keep missing.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Saying "It CANNOT help you if you talk to the police" is a question of fact, not a question of law. Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Samzenpus (not Samzempus) didn't write the article, I did; he just posted it.
Now: Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
"I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole"
The right is to the individual, not society. Besides that a lot of things could be crafted as "being good for society as a whole". Like telling people what to eat, drink and do.
Some people use "good for society" to mean "good for some abstract ideal, regardless of how individual people feel about it". That's not what I meant.
I meant "good for society" as in "good for individuals on average", so that the cost to some individuals is outweighed by the benefits to other individuals. Most restrictions on what full informed people want to eat and drink, do not pass that test. You might not want me to eat a pizza, but my wanting to eat a pizza outweighs your not wanting me to eat one, so the law allows me to eat a pizza since the benefits to me outweigh the costs to you.
On the other hand, if a criminal suspect had no right to remain silent, they would have to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a crime, it's not clear that this is any kind of cost at all, at least on innocent people. So I'm weighing costs and benefits when I'm asking whether it's "good for society".
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
This is the same error Professor Duane made -- you're looking only at the same of people who talk to cops and then get arrested, not the entire sample of people who talk to cops.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
What about the musings of the actual, y'know, cop?
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple examples of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or that Professor Duane was wrong?
Well Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police". The article gives an example of how someone could help themselves by talking to the police (turning in a criminal who lives next door to them, for example, and making themselves safer in the process). So unless that scenario never happens, Professor Duane's statement was wrong.
Now there may be sociological reasons why people don't talk to the police, but that's a separate problem. The article was simply saying that it's not true that "It CANNOT help to talk to the police", and people may be putting themselves at risk if they believe that.
I'm against censorship because the "arguments" in favor of it are usually absurd. I started asking questions about the Fifth Amendment because the arguments that people made in favor it, are also frequently absurd. For example I kept hearing people say that the Fifth Amendment is what protects us against torture, which is obviously wrong (third-party witnesses have no "right to remain silent", but they can't be tortured, so wherever the right against torture comes from, it can't come from the Fifth Amendment).
The challenge posed in the first article was to come up with a scenario that had a different outcome depending on whether we had the Fifth Amendment or not. Phrasing it this way forces people to think more carefully about the arguments they're making. For example if you're innocent, and the judge wants to ask you, "Did you do it?" Under the Fifth, you can refuse to answer. Without the Fifth, if you had to answer you would (presumably) just say "No". At that point, you're in the same boat either way -- if the court wants to convict you, they still have enough evidence. If the court is corrupt enough to fabricate evidence, the Fifth doesn't help you anyway.
My point was that Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police", and Officer Bruch's rebuttal gave multiple real-life examples from his own career, of how it can help you to talk to the police. So either Officer Bruch was lying or Professor Duane was wrong.
I went on to explain how this was caused by a sampling error -- Professor Duane was looking only at the people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested.
George Bruch, the police officer in the second video, gave several real-life examples of people who had helped themselves by talking to the police. (Either the police let them go because they decided the guy was innocent after all, or if the guy was guilty and admitted it, they told the judge that the suspect cooperated and the suspect got a more lenient sentence.)
So, do you think Officer Bruch was lying, or do you think Professor Duane was wrong when he said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police"?
As I said in the first article, the challenge is to come up with a specific scenario where the outcome is different depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not.
If you're worried about the police beating you until they get a confession -- guess what, if the cops are that corrupt, they'll do that whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. (We do have a Fifth Amendment, and they used to do this anyway -- hopefully not so much any more.)
On the other hand, if you can't think of a scenario that has a different outcome with or without the Fifth Amendment, then maybe that's a sign that the assumptions we've always taken for granted may not make as much sense as we assumed they did.
As I have explained in all three articles: The argument that the Fifth Amendment protects us from being tortured, is bogus. The reason is that if you are a third-party witness who is not at risk of incriminating yourself, you have no Fifth Amendment right to silence and can be held for contempt if you refuse to answer (this is what happened to Josh Wolf). But, obviously, you still cannot be tortured for refusing to answer. So wherever the right against torture comes from, it does not come from the Fifth Amendment.
"Did Bob do it?" -- and both refuse to answer, then Bob is allowed to do this but Alice can go to jail for remaining silent, even though Bob might be guilty, and Alice is the one who is known to be innocent! That seems crazy. "
You are mixing police and justice.
Both Bob and Alice should not be talking to the police.
Then the chances that one of them will be accused is much slimmer.
This is what happened to Josh Wolf. He witnessed some protesters torching a car, there was never any reasonable suspicion that he was involved in torching the car, but he didn't want to help the police, so he went to jail. If he had been accused of torching the car himself, he would have had every right to refuse to talk to the police (although he would run the risk of being convicted of torching the car). That's the bizarre part -- he was essentially punished for the fact that he was known to be innocent.
It might still be a bad idea on balance to talk the police, but you couldn't make that argument by limiting your sample to the people who get arrested. "
If you don't talk to the police, chances are great that you will never be arrested and put before a judge, rightfully so or not.
Ask Martha, she went to jail for lying to the police, that's always the risk, even if you escape being punished for the real alleged crime.
That was kind of his point, which you seem to have missed entirely.
Well if all she had said was "I didn't commit the crime", then to convict her of lying, they would have had to convict her of the crime. And if they had enough evidence to do that, it wouldn't have mattered whether she had remained silent or said "I didn't do it."
My understanding is that she went beyond saying "I didn't do it" and tried to forge a paper trail supposedly proving her innocence, and the forensic evidence caught her. If it's true, that's what got her in trouble, not simply claiming innocence.
As I explained in the first article: If you take away the "right to remain silent", a suspect can still say, "No, I didn't do it," and the police options for "coercing" them are the same as they were before.
That's why I said in the first article: the only answer I would accept is a specific scenario in which the outcome is different because of the Fifth Amendment.
Take the cops trying to coerce a confession. With the Fifth Amendment, the suspect remains silent, which cops don't like. Without the Fifth Amendment, the suspect can say, "I didn't do it", and refuse to answer questions about anything else, which cops don't like. You haven't shown why the outcome in either case would be different. (If you think the cops are going to beat the suspect until they get the answer they want, that's a problem whether the suspect is remaining silent, or giving answers other than what the cops want to hear.)
You're missing the point, it's the facts which contradict the advice being given by a law professor. It's a question of fact, not a question of law.
He said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Then he ceded his time to a police officer who gave at least two examples of real-life situations where a person had made themselves better off by talking to the police. Unless Officer Bruch was completely making those stories up, Professor Duane was wrong.
And then I explained that this was caused by a sampling error -- Professor Duane looked only at the people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested.
Well Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police", and I was just using that as an example where he was probably wrong.
Now maybe he meant to say, "The police SHOULD behave in such a manner that it DOES NOT help if you talk to the police" [i.e., if you pull someone over, always treat someone who remains silent exactly the same as someone who sheepishly admits what they did], but that's a different argument.
Yes, I did contribute. I just realized, I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that the editors changed the title of this article without checking with me. It was originally "Burning Man Made (Slightly) Easier", and they created the title "What I Did During My Summer Vacation: Burning Man Edition". This makes it sound like I spent my entire time at Burning Man riding my rented bike back to my storebought tent so I could keep melting my own water.
Actually, I volunteered multiple shifts with Charcadia, the village I was staying in, which set up Dance Dance Immolation and some other fire-themed games. When I wasn't doing that, I was biking around doing street magic for people. I didn't go into this in the article because it didn't fit into an article about how to make Burning Man easier to get through. If I had been writing an article about "What I Did At Burning Man" (as the editors seem to think I did), I would have gone into more detail about actively participating.
The whole point is that I had more time to do all of those things because I took the easy route by paying dues to a camp that brought in food and water, setting up a storebought tent instead of a hexayurt, etc.
To be honest, I would have seen nothing wrong with recommending renting an RV as an option, except that (1) I didn't know much about it, but (2) I've heard that option is quite expensive. But if coming in an RV solves certain problems for you, so that it frees up more time for you to go out and actively participate, what's wrong with that?
As for renting the bike, I did say that you have to pre-arrange the bike rental before you get out there. (Perhaps it wasn't clear, but that includes pre-paying before you get out there, since as you point out, you're not supposed to pay for anything during the event.)
I went to Burning Man instead of Mardi Gras because you can see amazing things at Burning Man that you can't see anywhere else. That's no particular reason to lug in all of your own water instead of pooling resources and paying someone in your camp to do it.
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Regardless of why, people posted this video so often that I thought I should point out that the central premise is wrong.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Either Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong.
OK, at one point he says, "Either tell the 100% complete truth or SHUT UP". Later, he just says "SHUT UP SHUT UP". Which is it?
In the first case he seems to be saying that telling the truth is a valid option, which is what I'm saying.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
If your rule is that you don't want to hear contradictions like that pointed out, unless it's done by a law professor, maybe the problem is with your rule?
samzenpus is the editor, I wrote the article.
Anyway, I'm not assuming the police or judges are trustworthy at all. I'm just saying that if they're corrupt, the Fifth doesn't help you.
Suppose you're innocent and either the cops or the judge asks you, "Did you do it?" With the Fifth, you refuse to answer. Without the Fifth, you say No.
At that point, you're in the same boat either way. If they fabricate enough evidence to convict you, the Fifth doesn't help you. If the cops haul you away and beat you up until you sign a confession, and then tell the court that you signed the confession of your own free will, the Fifth didn't help you either -- because the cops will just say that you voluntarily waived your Fifth Amendment rights and signed the confession anyway.
The challenge I posed in the first article was: Come up with a specific scenario where the outcome is different depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. The scenarios above fail that test. Most of the other scenarios people have proposed, also fail that test. You can assume the government is corrupt, you just still have to show that the Fifth would affect the outcome somehow even if the government is corrupt.
I don't see why, in the subject at hand, we should take his opinion over an experienced law professors, or even an ex-police officer's opinion.
The professor and the cop are saying opposite things, whether they realized it or not, and that's what people keep missing.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Regarding your first question: http://www.giyf.com/
Saying "It CANNOT help you if you talk to the police" is a question of fact, not a question of law. Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Samzenpus (not Samzempus) didn't write the article, I did; he just posted it. Now: Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
"I was asking whether the defendant's right to remain silent is good for society as a whole" The right is to the individual, not society. Besides that a lot of things could be crafted as "being good for society as a whole". Like telling people what to eat, drink and do.
Some people use "good for society" to mean "good for some abstract ideal, regardless of how individual people feel about it". That's not what I meant.
I meant "good for society" as in "good for individuals on average", so that the cost to some individuals is outweighed by the benefits to other individuals. Most restrictions on what full informed people want to eat and drink, do not pass that test. You might not want me to eat a pizza, but my wanting to eat a pizza outweighs your not wanting me to eat one, so the law allows me to eat a pizza since the benefits to me outweigh the costs to you.
On the other hand, if a criminal suspect had no right to remain silent, they would have to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a crime, it's not clear that this is any kind of cost at all, at least on innocent people. So I'm weighing costs and benefits when I'm asking whether it's "good for society".
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
Focus on the question, not the messenger.
This is the same error Professor Duane made -- you're looking only at the same of people who talk to cops and then get arrested, not the entire sample of people who talk to cops.
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple real-life examples from his own career of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or was Professor Duane wrong?
What about the musings of the actual, y'know, cop?
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police". Officer Bruch gave multiple examples of people who helped themselves by talking to the police. Do you think Officer Bruch was lying or that Professor Duane was wrong?
Well Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police". The article gives an example of how someone could help themselves by talking to the police (turning in a criminal who lives next door to them, for example, and making themselves safer in the process). So unless that scenario never happens, Professor Duane's statement was wrong.
Now there may be sociological reasons why people don't talk to the police, but that's a separate problem. The article was simply saying that it's not true that "It CANNOT help to talk to the police", and people may be putting themselves at risk if they believe that.
Hey, I still make the proxy sites.
I'm against censorship because the "arguments" in favor of it are usually absurd. I started asking questions about the Fifth Amendment because the arguments that people made in favor it, are also frequently absurd. For example I kept hearing people say that the Fifth Amendment is what protects us against torture, which is obviously wrong (third-party witnesses have no "right to remain silent", but they can't be tortured, so wherever the right against torture comes from, it can't come from the Fifth Amendment).
The challenge posed in the first article was to come up with a scenario that had a different outcome depending on whether we had the Fifth Amendment or not. Phrasing it this way forces people to think more carefully about the arguments they're making. For example if you're innocent, and the judge wants to ask you, "Did you do it?" Under the Fifth, you can refuse to answer. Without the Fifth, if you had to answer you would (presumably) just say "No". At that point, you're in the same boat either way -- if the court wants to convict you, they still have enough evidence. If the court is corrupt enough to fabricate evidence, the Fifth doesn't help you anyway.
My point was that Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police", and Officer Bruch's rebuttal gave multiple real-life examples from his own career, of how it can help you to talk to the police. So either Officer Bruch was lying or Professor Duane was wrong.
I went on to explain how this was caused by a sampling error -- Professor Duane was looking only at the people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested.
George Bruch, the police officer in the second video, gave several real-life examples of people who had helped themselves by talking to the police. (Either the police let them go because they decided the guy was innocent after all, or if the guy was guilty and admitted it, they told the judge that the suspect cooperated and the suspect got a more lenient sentence.)
So, do you think Officer Bruch was lying, or do you think Professor Duane was wrong when he said "It CANNOT help to talk to the police"?
As I said in the first article, the challenge is to come up with a specific scenario where the outcome is different depending on whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not.
If you're worried about the police beating you until they get a confession -- guess what, if the cops are that corrupt, they'll do that whether we have a Fifth Amendment or not. (We do have a Fifth Amendment, and they used to do this anyway -- hopefully not so much any more.)
On the other hand, if you can't think of a scenario that has a different outcome with or without the Fifth Amendment, then maybe that's a sign that the assumptions we've always taken for granted may not make as much sense as we assumed they did.
As I have explained in all three articles: The argument that the Fifth Amendment protects us from being tortured, is bogus. The reason is that if you are a third-party witness who is not at risk of incriminating yourself, you have no Fifth Amendment right to silence and can be held for contempt if you refuse to answer (this is what happened to Josh Wolf). But, obviously, you still cannot be tortured for refusing to answer. So wherever the right against torture comes from, it does not come from the Fifth Amendment.
"Did Bob do it?" -- and both refuse to answer, then Bob is allowed to do this but Alice can go to jail for remaining silent, even though Bob might be guilty, and Alice is the one who is known to be innocent! That seems crazy. "
You are mixing police and justice. Both Bob and Alice should not be talking to the police. Then the chances that one of them will be accused is much slimmer.
This is what happened to Josh Wolf. He witnessed some protesters torching a car, there was never any reasonable suspicion that he was involved in torching the car, but he didn't want to help the police, so he went to jail. If he had been accused of torching the car himself, he would have had every right to refuse to talk to the police (although he would run the risk of being convicted of torching the car). That's the bizarre part -- he was essentially punished for the fact that he was known to be innocent.
It might still be a bad idea on balance to talk the police, but you couldn't make that argument by limiting your sample to the people who get arrested. "
If you don't talk to the police, chances are great that you will never be arrested and put before a judge, rightfully so or not. Ask Martha, she went to jail for lying to the police, that's always the risk, even if you escape being punished for the real alleged crime.
That was kind of his point, which you seem to have missed entirely.
Well if all she had said was "I didn't commit the crime", then to convict her of lying, they would have had to convict her of the crime. And if they had enough evidence to do that, it wouldn't have mattered whether she had remained silent or said "I didn't do it."
My understanding is that she went beyond saying "I didn't do it" and tried to forge a paper trail supposedly proving her innocence, and the forensic evidence caught her. If it's true, that's what got her in trouble, not simply claiming innocence.
As I explained in the first article: If you take away the "right to remain silent", a suspect can still say, "No, I didn't do it," and the police options for "coercing" them are the same as they were before.
That's why I said in the first article: the only answer I would accept is a specific scenario in which the outcome is different because of the Fifth Amendment.
Take the cops trying to coerce a confession. With the Fifth Amendment, the suspect remains silent, which cops don't like. Without the Fifth Amendment, the suspect can say, "I didn't do it", and refuse to answer questions about anything else, which cops don't like. You haven't shown why the outcome in either case would be different. (If you think the cops are going to beat the suspect until they get the answer they want, that's a problem whether the suspect is remaining silent, or giving answers other than what the cops want to hear.)
Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police." Officer Bruch gave examples of people who helped themselves by talking to the police.
As a licensed attorney since 2006, do you think Officer Bruch is lying, or Professor Duane is wrong?
I don't know who that is.
You're missing the point, it's the facts which contradict the advice being given by a law professor. It's a question of fact, not a question of law.
He said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police". Then he ceded his time to a police officer who gave at least two examples of real-life situations where a person had made themselves better off by talking to the police. Unless Officer Bruch was completely making those stories up, Professor Duane was wrong.
And then I explained that this was caused by a sampling error -- Professor Duane looked only at the people who talked to the police and ended up getting arrested.
Which part of this do you think is incorrect?
Well Professor Duane said "It CANNOT help if you talk to the police", and I was just using that as an example where he was probably wrong.
Now maybe he meant to say, "The police SHOULD behave in such a manner that it DOES NOT help if you talk to the police" [i.e., if you pull someone over, always treat someone who remains silent exactly the same as someone who sheepishly admits what they did], but that's a different argument.
Yes, I did contribute. I just realized, I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that the editors changed the title of this article without checking with me. It was originally "Burning Man Made (Slightly) Easier", and they created the title "What I Did During My Summer Vacation: Burning Man Edition". This makes it sound like I spent my entire time at Burning Man riding my rented bike back to my storebought tent so I could keep melting my own water.
Actually, I volunteered multiple shifts with Charcadia, the village I was staying in, which set up Dance Dance Immolation and some other fire-themed games. When I wasn't doing that, I was biking around doing street magic for people. I didn't go into this in the article because it didn't fit into an article about how to make Burning Man easier to get through. If I had been writing an article about "What I Did At Burning Man" (as the editors seem to think I did), I would have gone into more detail about actively participating.
The whole point is that I had more time to do all of those things because I took the easy route by paying dues to a camp that brought in food and water, setting up a storebought tent instead of a hexayurt, etc.
To be honest, I would have seen nothing wrong with recommending renting an RV as an option, except that (1) I didn't know much about it, but (2) I've heard that option is quite expensive. But if coming in an RV solves certain problems for you, so that it frees up more time for you to go out and actively participate, what's wrong with that?
As for renting the bike, I did say that you have to pre-arrange the bike rental before you get out there. (Perhaps it wasn't clear, but that includes pre-paying before you get out there, since as you point out, you're not supposed to pay for anything during the event.)
I went to Burning Man instead of Mardi Gras because you can see amazing things at Burning Man that you can't see anywhere else. That's no particular reason to lug in all of your own water instead of pooling resources and paying someone in your camp to do it.