Hey, Steve Palmer here.

LawyerTalkPodcast.com gonna jump right in.

You have a right to remain silent.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in court.

Do you have a right to have a lawyer present before you talk to the police?

Everybody knows the rest.

Maybe.

Anyway, I'm bringing this up today because.

And certainly we've beat this horse, maybe beat this horse to death, but there's nuance here.

I want to talk about.

I had a client recently come into the office and he had been contacted by the police.

The police want to talk to him.

He's been accused of some sort of wrongdoing, and the police want to talk to him.

And I think the word is finally getting out to most people that don't do that.

I don't care if you're innocent.

I don't care if you're innocent.

As the day is long.

I don't care if you've never committed a crime.

I don't care if you were in Alaska at the time they said you committed a crime here in Ohio.

Don't talk to the police.

And this guy knew that he was smart enough to.

Not smart enough, but he had, he had been educated enough in the media or maybe even watching our podcast to know you don't talk to the police.

But here's what he wanted to do.

He wanted me to go with him to talk to the police, and then he was going to tell the police everything anyway.

And not as bad as talking to the police on his own, but certainly maybe not a perfect solution anyway.

And here's what I mean by this.

People ask me all the time, look, the police want to interview me.

Can you go with me and meet me at the police department and, and, and I'll give a statement that way.

Here's the problem.

I have, like, I have one rule on this.

You're either going to talk to the police or you're not going to talk to the police.

You're either going to tell the truth or you're not going to tell, or you're not going to tell them anything.

And it doesn't, I don't want to say, it doesn't matter that I'm there, because if I'm there and somebody's making a statement to the police, certainly I won't permit the trickery and the techniques.

The, there's, there's something the police use called the Reed technique, which is this technique to get people to talk.

I'm not going to let that stuff go on.

If my clients given a statement and if I sense that the police are sort of overreaching or getting to a point where they're pressuring my client to say something.

I'll just pull the plug, I don't care.

But sometimes that's too late.

You know, I would much prefer my client to say nothing 99.999% of the time.

And what I really mean is it doesn't matter if I'm sitting there or not.

You're still going to say nothing.

Your statement's not going to change if I'm sitting there.

The substance of it anyway would be the same, and you're still supplying the police information.

And, and often, in fact, too often this occurs before we know what's going on.

Let me tell you what I mean by that, and I'll use police read technique, verbiage to punctuate the point.

Often it's sort of like the old saying, if you're over the target, you're catching flak.

And the more flak you catch, the more you're over the target.

And if you're in there, if you're talking to the police, you're in there.

They're layers, so to speak, in an interview room.

And, and you start to tell them you don't want to talk and they get upset by it.

Well, you know that, that you're probably right not to talk.

And the more they convince you you should talk, the less you should talk.

So it's sort of like reverse psychology.

Anyway.

One of the things that the police use, one of the techniques I hear all the time, look, buddy, you know, we've got one side of the story.

You're.

The alleged victim has told us her side of the story or his side of the story.

And I guess if you want us to operate only on her side of the story, we'll just do what we need to do and that'll be that.

We'll send it off to the prosecutor without you telling us what really happened.

And then it's like these little subtle guilt hooks that they stick into you to try to get you to talk and thinking, oh my gosh, if I don't talk, they're not going to hear my side of the story and they're going to charge me with a crime and I'm doomed.

Well, I'm here to tell you you're doomed anyway.

You're not going to talk them out of the crime.

But back to my point, what I do, when I say this client that came in says, look, the police want to talk to me, the problem is this I don't know what exactly the police want to talk to my client about.

Now usually we have some idea of what the accusation is, but we don't know the details of it.

Not like they do anyway.

My typical response then is to call the police and say, look, Officer Smith or Detective Jones or whoever you are, I'm just calling to get your side of the story.

I just want to hear what you have to say about the case.

Because I can't make an informed decision to advise my client on whether he should make a statement to you unless I know the whole side of the story.

So I can't operate on half the story.

And if I only have my half of the story, but I don't have your half of the story, then I guess that's what I'll have to operate on.

And my client can't talk.

I use the same technique to, with the police that they use on my clients.

I'm not saying it always works and sometimes they laugh at me for saying stuff like that, but I almost always ask them, look, I can't make an informed decision about whether my client should make a statement unless you tell me, officer, Detective Sergeant, whoever you are, what's really going on and then I can talk intelligently with my client about it.

Because so often the police have details that we don't know.

The police have an agenda that we're not exactly filled in on and they will, they will bring those things up during an interview and then you're caught off guard, you're caught flat footed, you're caught without having an idea of what your answer is going to be.

That's why you don't go talk to the police.

And that's why I typically don't even let people.

It doesn't change my opinion, doesn't change if I'm sitting there.

The idea is what are the police trying to gain and, and what do we know about the case and how does it help us to talk to the police?

Not how it helps them.

Look, if you're in doubt, if you don't know what to do, don't talk to the police.

And if you come to me and say, I want to go talk to the police with you, I'm going to tell you, yeah, probably not.

You got a question?

You got a topic you want me to cover in my wheelhouse or outside my.

I'll do my best to answer your questions right here.

Lawyer talk podcast, off the record, on the air.