Constabulary:
“Police lie. It’s part of their job.”
From a training manual written by retired prosecutor Val Van Brocklin:
Police lie. It’s part of their job. They lie to suspects and others in hopes of obtaining evidence. These investigative lies cover a wide web of deception – a web that can get tangled. Some investigative lies are legal, some are not, and some generate significant disagreement amongst courts, prosecutors, the public and officers themselves.
We’re big boys, so we’re not going to pretend that this is outrageous. What’s outrageous is the little quote that ends Mr Van Brocklin’s summary of a murder trial of a man named Miller that was complicated by a lot of helpful mendacity on the investigating officers’ part.
Miller appealed his conviction. A 3-judge state appellate court unanimously reversed the conviction. Based on the same facts, they ruled the detective engaged in deceptive coercion that shocked the conscience and violated due process.
End of story? Not yet. The state supreme court reinstated the conviction – but only by the hair’s breadth of a 4:3 split decision. After that, Miller took his appeal through federal district court and the United States Supreme Court, and had his conviction affirmed on procedural grounds with neither federal court addressing whether the police conduct was unlawfully deceptive.
The moral of this agonizingly long story? Courts are judges, judges are lawyers, and
You can’t get two lawyers to agree to kill a rat in a bathtub. – Karl S. Johnstone, Superior Court Judge, Retired.
We believe that open contempt for judges and lawyers has no place in a training manual. More than that, though, we’re disturbed by the writer’s disregard for standards of judicial impartiality that have, as it happens, been developed largely as an protective antidote to the thuggish, band-of-brothers mentality that Mr Van Brocklin undisparagingly imputes to police officers. (Officer; via reddit)