The Conservative Cave
Current Events => The DUmpster => Topic started by: franksolich on March 11, 2015, 06:56:39 PM
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http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026349989
Oh my.
DisgustipatedinCA (8,513 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:02 PM
Question for msanthrope and other legal types
The law is far from my area of expertise, so I have a question for attorneys or anyone else who may be able to answer.
I believe that courts have long deferred to the word of police officers over the word of citizens. If a citizen goes to court and says that "A" happened, and an involved police officer says no, actually "B" happened, absent any other evidence, the court will believe the police officer over the citizen.
If this is the case--that courts will believe a cop before they'll believe "man on the street", is there any chance that this will change over time? We all know lots of stories about cops lying, planting guns, planting evidence, making claims that are countered by video evidence, making claims about unarmed men reaching for waistbands, and so on. In some of those cases, it can be proven that the police are lying.
So my question is this: is there some way to establish a legal precedent that police officers shouldn't necessarily be taken at their word? If there is a way to establish this precedent, is this happening? Are police being challenged as possibly dishonest in courtrooms, not for something they themselves have done, but rather for the body of lies police have told in aggregate? In my opinion, not all police are trustworthy, and in my further opinion, their word should not always be taken as gospel.
former9thward (13,797 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:14 PM
1. If it is just the police verses a defendant
courts will generally believe the police because the court will think the police have no reason to lie while it may be in the self interest of the defendant to lie. That being said judges, especially at the local level, do have a relationship with prosecutors and police. They see each other every day and engage each other in friendly banter as any co-workers do.
But most judges are not going to blindly take the word of a cop. Judges are not idiots, they can often tell when someone, cop or not, is lying. Once you have been caught in a lie your word is mud from then on. For that very reason police are taught in the academy to tell the truth and don't worry about the outcome of the case. That is the prosecutor's problem not theirs.
I was a prosecutor for a major city for several years and I worked with police witnesses everyday. I never knew any of them to deliberately lie. There was just no point to it. You want your word to be trusted over the long run. Damn what happens in any given case.
cheyanne (295 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:47 PM
4. You are assuming that the prosecutor is impartial and so will not trust that cop again.
However, the prosecutors and cops rely on each other. In Ferguson we see a case where the cops and prosecutors and judges all knew that there were phony charges, but no one blew the whistle. The blog Simple Justice examines some of these cases and notes that prosecutors are rarely punished when the courts find they have violated a defendant's rights.
geek tragedy (43,630 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:19 PM
2. finders of fact are supposed to judge the credibility of witnesses before them without resorting
to a "cop good, defendant bad" type of mentality. Whether it's a judge or a jury, they're not supposed to treat police testimony as inherently more truthful, reliable or credible than those of regular citizens.
So, there's no rule of law that can be enacted really--what you argue in favor of is already the rule.
Is that rule followed? Of course not.
How do we ensure it gets followed more regularly? Beats me.
Major Nikon (16,553 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:34 PM
3. If you go to court and say you didn't run that stop sign
...but a cop said you did, you are going to lose every time.
The reason is because you have a vested interest in lying while the cop does not. So usually there's more to it than just your word against a cop. Trying to establish a legal precedent that because cops sometimes lie they can't be trusted is probably not going to get you very far.
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Ms Piggy facing a drug rap or something?
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cheyanne (295 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 04:47 PM
4. You are assuming that the prosecutor is impartial and so will not trust that cop again.
However, the prosecutors and cops rely on each other. In Ferguson we see a case where the cops and prosecutors and judges all knew that there were phony charges, but no one blew the whistle.
:orly: I'm raising the :bs2flag: on this. I watched Eric "The Racist" Holder's entire rant about the Ferguson PD. Not once did he mention any phony charges. In fact he left out the damning evidence of case outcomes where more minorities were found guilty than whites. However, his complaint was that minorities were unfairly targeted, not trumped up charges.
To paraphrase Willie Sutton, police look for criminals where the crimes are being committed. That just happens to be minority neighborhoods most of the time.
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MsPiggy finally shows up:
msanthrope (29,654 posts) Wed Mar 11, 2015, 06:38 PM
12. There are a number of techniques you use to level the playing field.....
1) The voir dire....in Philly, there are questions on the pre-printed voir that ask if you are more likely to believe the police, or less, or just the same as everyone else. That helps identify certain jurors (along with other questions) who might be pro-cop types.
2) Area of the city where people live....you want people from places where the cops are least helpful---working class, poor, and hipster neighborhoods.
3) You always check the cops social media. Cops think they are so, soooooo....****in' smart. They're all on social media. So are their girlfriends, family, wives, and kids. If a cop is posting to Facebook at the same time on a police report.....
4) Always check who showed up at the scene but the DA didn't call.
5) Always ask the judge for a warning instruction to the jury in the charge that cops are to be assessed on credibility just like anyone else.
6) Always question their daily working conditions, percentage of arrests, where they sat when they observed the crime....
7) You hammer them on prior arrest, interactions, work history. You throw the kitchen sink.
The thing is--you'd never get that precedent because it's discriminatory....it's judging people's credibility based on a class or occupation. But trust me...this is why people on DU should answer their jury calls.
Because cops don't testify....they "testilie."
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Jurors aren't selected if they state that they would value a cop's opinion more or less.
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I'm starting to worry about DU. It seems like every time one of them throws out some red meat, someone like former9thward steps up and pees in their cornflakes.
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MsPiggy finally shows up:
The fact that she's allowed to raise a child is beyond disturbing - her kid's going to grow up hating police. And as we've seen, THAT usually never ends well.
Hey brilliant legal minds at DU - if your kid takes a bullet one day as the direct result of being brainwashed by you, can he or she sue you, assuming he or she survives?
Repugnant human being.
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The fact that she's allowed to raise a child is beyond disturbing - her kid's going to grow up hating police. And as we've seen, THAT usually never ends well.
Hey brilliant legal minds at DU - if your kid takes a bullet one day as the direct result of being brainwashed by you, can he or she sue you, assuming he or she survives?
Repugnant human being.
Well now, the advice she gave was actually pretty reasonable from a defense counsel's point of view. I saw cops lie on the stand when I was prosecuting, there was one cop in particular whose tickets I wouldn't take to a contested trial because I had no confidence in his truthfulness.
It does happen, and though a vast majority of the cops are just trying to do the right thing by the book and tell the truth as they see it, there is still a huge number of cops in the US and so there are a lot of bad ones too. Since they are all, good or bad, quite accustomed to the courtroom environment and testifying on the stand, if they are inclined to lie (And protecting their record and the validity of their arrest is a motive for that, the same as avoiding conviction and penalty is for the defendant), it is unlikely that anyone in the courtroom will catch them at it. So, actually, the judge or jury taking the cop's word over any other single person's is really is a problem in court, just as much as the other way 'round when you try a case in a jurisdiction where the jury pool likely contains a lot of people with a dim view of the police.
In most states, there's no right to a jury trial unless the maximum penalty is over six months in jail, so when you're talking about traffic offenses below DUI or hit-and-run, voir dire and jury temperament are out the window, it all comes down to the judge or magistrate that has heard the same cops again and again, and who may themselves have an interest in maximizing the fines and penalties, and so the cop's testimony tends to carry a lot more weight than is theoretically warranted.
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Well now, the advice she gave was actually pretty reasonable from a defense counsel's point of view.
Here's the thing - for a long time now, I was also thinking her reasonable when she commented on various legal cases, oftentimes schooling the unterprimitiven when they'd rush to the defense of whatever criminal was headlining the news of the day. But this Ferguson business has done her in. She's no longer using any sort of reason and she's especially gleeful when discussing the hopeful ruination of entire police forces.....the termination of pensions....widespread layoffs.
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There is that. While her advice is valid for an individual case, I expect she would quickly come to rue the day if her general war against the police succeeded, though no doubt she would declare it was someone else's fault.