You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

by James J. Duane

[A]ny lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances. —Former United States Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, Watts v. Indiana, 338 U.S. 49, 59 (1949) (concurring opinion)

the problem is that these methods of calculated deception are too effective. They do not merely work on the guilty. At least some of these methods, it turns out, have proven to be just as effective in getting innocent people to make incriminating statements, and sometimes even outright confessions.

The most recent and comprehensive investigation, which took a careful look at 250 prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence, found that 16 percent of them made what’s called a false confession: admitting their commission of a crime that they did not commit.5 Those are the cases in which the defendant actually confessed; in many more cases, the innocent suspect denied all guilt, sometimes for hours, but still gave the police a statement that was then used to help convict him. Out of all the hundreds of innocent men and women who were wrongly convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence, more than 25 percent made either a false confession or an incriminating statement.6 Every one of those suspects would have been much better off, and might have avoided going to prison altogether, if they had simply read this book.

Because of laws like these and countless others, legal experts now agree that just about everybody in the nation, whether they know it or not, is guilty of numerous felonies for which they could be prosecuted. One reliable estimate is that the average American now commits approximately three felonies a day.26 As one federal judge recently observed, because there are “thousands of federal crimes and hundreds of thousands of federal regulations that can be criminally enforced,” the sad truth today is that “most people have committed at least one crime carrying serious consequences,” including countless Americans who have no idea what law they have broken, or how they may have done so.27 That is why you cannot listen to your conscience when faced by a police officer and think, I have nothing to hide.