Can a police officer lie? In the unfortunate event, someone finds themselves being questioned by the police in the US, and they ask for a lawyer, but in an unlikely event the police officer says "you don't need a lawyer you're not under arrest, just being questioned", then the person being questioned proceeds in self-incrimination. Were their statements legally obtained?
A police officer can lie, and lying does not render a statement inadmissible. But there is a separate area of law regarding self-incrimination and the right to a lawyer. The basic principle is that a person can always assert their 5th Amendment rights, whether or not they are under arrest. When a person is under arrest and has asserted their right to an attorney, questioning must stop and anything that results from further questions is inadmissible. There is no single factor that distinguishes ordering asking questions from custodial interrogation. For example if you have been dragged by officers to the police station and held in a locked room for hours in the middle of night, one would reasonably believe that you were taken into custody, and interrogation must stop once you request a lawyer. In Oregon v. Mathiason, 429 U.S. 492, police contacted the defendant whom they suspected was involved in a burglary and they invite him to chat at the station. They lie and say they found his fingerprints at the scene (they did not). He then confesses, they read him his rights, and he confesses again. The confession is admissible, because this was not a custodial interrogation. The relevant question is whether "a reasonable person would have felt he or she was not at liberty to terminate the interrogation and leave".
So first things first, whether or not Stand Your Ground is in play, the burden of proof is always on the State to prove any crime did happen and any defense does not. Another thing that I think you confused in your question is it seems apparent that you think Stand Your Ground is Self Defense. This is not true. In the United States, self-defense is always a legal right for a victim of a potential crime, regardless of if your state has Stand Your Ground or Duty to Flee laws. Self-Defense typically can include justifiable homicide as you are not privy to the intent of the bad actor. Under Duty To Flee laws, you cannot claim self defense if you could reasonably get away from a criminal action safely... if given the choice between fight or flight, you must flee the scene. Stand Your Ground contradicts this and says that if you are in a public place and a criminal is trying to make you a victim, you have every right to defend yourself without any duty to remove yourself from the situation first... basically at this point, you can make either choice and not worry about losing justifiable Homicide. Making a criminal arrest of a Stand Your Ground claimant at the seen is not necessarily required. While the claim may be disputed, in the case of firearms, using an illegally owned weapon is typically ground for arrest regardless... (probably not in cases where the illegal gun was introduced to the scene by the dead criminal... and the victim picked it up in a scuffle... though this requires some measure of sorting out). Legal Fire Arms are very well documented and the fire arm in question will be confiscated as evidence. If it is found that it was not a justifiable homicide, the person in question is probably at the address tied to the gun. Now, again, Stand Your Ground only applies to steps needed for Self-Defense, it is not self-defense itself. Self-Defense authorizes only the amount of force needed to safely resolve the situation, up to and including leathal force, but it does not require you to kill the perpetrator in every instance it is invoked. For example, if merely pointing a gun at a perpetrator is enough to stop the crime, you do not get to pull the trigger. That flips it back into homicide. Similarly, if I pull my gun and the guy advances anyway, I may fire and if the guy is on the ground and out cold (thus, no longer a threat), I don't get to walk up, and put a second bullet between his eyes, execution style. This too is murder. As a bit of anecdotal evidence, when I was living in Florida, I worked for a man who just recently purchased a firearm for self-defense (in the home only) and he said that when he was filling out paperwork with the police, the cop looking over his paperwork said, "Now remember, if you have to use that, shoot to kill. It's less paperwork for us." Now, I wasn't there when to cop said it, I don't know what his tone was. I took it as the cop being a little funny, but maybe a little inappropriate. I cannot speak to how much that is indicitive of FL Police culture. It was hearsay on my part... I just thouht it was funny and... demonstrates the attitude towards self-defense. Essentially, by the time cops arrive at the scene, they HARD PART is over... they merely have to collect evidence and take witness statements. If the shooter is cooperating and his story checks out, it will look very bad if they detain a crime victim who defended himself. It's just bad PR. Ultimately, his job is to collect all evidence, not determine if the case should go to trial. As I mentioned, the gun was legally owned in the specific case, and more than likely the CCTV tape is collected, but not yet viewed. Hindsight may be 20/20 but at the time, I do not think it's fair to say that the cop knew this might not be such a clear cut case. In such cases, the cop may not make an arrest because there is not any crime that he can charge the man with and he is cooperating. And keep in mind that in the heat of the moment for the shooter, he may not even realize he did something that might break his self-defense case. Cops can detain a person claiming Stand Your Ground for just about any legitimate reason, even suspicion of homicide that the detainee will claim is self-defense.
Is asking police to justify their orders illegal? NO but the manner in which the &quot;asking&quot; is done may be.
Are police required to contact a real lawyer if you ask? give opinions from a number of lawyers and police in different jurisdictions. The basic consensus is that in most jurisdictions, such behavior will get the case thrown out of court and often get the police officer who tried this fired. HOWEVER there was a case where this was tried and while the case was thrown out on appeal, it was not as simple as the postings in the above article may have made it appear. This story shows a case where the Tennessee police actually did this. While the lower court allowed it because the defendant was "gullible", the appeals court rejected this argument. [T]he conduct of the law enforcement officers in this case, and in particular Detective Henry, is so egregious that it simply cannot go unchecked. That Detective Henry would illegally pose as an attorney and arrange the circumstances of the defendant’s case to make it appear as though he had successfully undertaken legal representation of the defendant is abhorrent. That the detective would specifically instruct the defendant not to communicate the relationship to his appointed counsel, in what we can only assume was an effort to enlarge the time for the detective to gain incriminating information from the defendant, renders completely reprehensible the state action in this case. Given the unconscionable behavior of the state actors in this case and the fact that the defendant was essentially prevented from proving prejudice through no fault of his own, we have no trouble concluding that the only appropriate remedy in this case is the dismissal of all the indictments.
That really depends what they lie about In the United States, there's no general law against lying. The fact that a statement is false doesn't inherently strip it of protection under the first amendment. Public figures lie to the public all the time. That's why news companies have fact checkers. Was it defamatory? It is, however, illegal to defame someone. If someone makes a false statement of fact (that is, not an opinion) about a person or company, they may be liable for that. Whether they are liable for that depends on a number of factors, including whether the target is a public figure (see New York Times Co. v. Sullivan), the speaker's knowledge of its falsity, and whether the target was damaged by it. Was it part of some other criminal scheme? False statements to the public could be part of some sort of fraud, for instance. Pump and dump schemes, for instance, are illegal. Was it under oath? Lying under oath (such as when testifying in court) would constitute perjury, which is a crime. There are many other situations in which lying could be a crime (such as lying on your taxes), but these are the main ones I can think of that would be about lying to the public. In this case (I'm unfamiliar with the details of what he said, so I'm just going off your description), I can't immediately think of any reason that could lead to liability. Mocking and calling something a &quot;nothing burger&quot; is pretty clearly an opinion, not a false statement of fact. I'm not aware of any securities law against saying you don't like something you're actually invested in (though I'm not especially familiar with securities law).
I'm not going to comment on the specifics of this law; rather, I think this question shows a misconception of the way the legal system works in general. Here's the question: do you actually have "legally privileged" material on your phone? If not, what's keeping you from claiming that is that it's not true, and lying to a police officer is a bad idea. And just putting a letter from your lawyer on the phone doesn't mean you've established a legal privilege--attorney-client privilege is not a magic spell, it's a reasonable system of protection that only covers certain communications. The bottom line is: the statute in general, and that clause in particular, were included in the law to protect real, important, and substantial legal right. The courts interpret the law in light of that purpose. If the police officer finds a solution that protects your rights while still carrying out the purpose of the statute, the court will be unlikely to fault him or her. In this case, if you tell the officer that there is a letter from your attorney in a particular folder, the obvious solution is for the officer not to open that folder. Problem solved. In practice, in the United States at least, these cases are dealt with routinely; computers are seized, and attorneys and judges work together to ensure that privilege is protected while still allowing reasonable access to seized materials. I would imagine the same is true in the U.K. The bottom line is: the law is not a game, and technical "gotchas" are rarely effective. Common law systems allow judges enough leeway to avoid this sort of pointless technicality.
You are correct. A judge may only issue a warrant when it is supported by an affidavit, in which the officer seeking the warrant swears under oath to the facts supporting the warrant. Lying on the affidavit would constitute perjury. But judges very frequently just rubber-stamp the warrants without meaningfully reviewing the affidavits, so the primary form of oversight would be the defendant's Fourth Amendment challenge asserting that the warrant wasn't supported by probable cause. If a judge does review the warrant application and finds the officer's statements not to be credible, he can refuse to sign the warrant, and he is free to also carry that credibility determination to subsequent warrants sought by the same officer or other officers in his department.
There is no hard and fast rule to determine what constitutes proof beyond a reasonable doubt. In the first instance, the judge (or jury, when there is a jury trial) decides this on a case by case basis. If the officer testifies that the matters recorded in the ticket are true because it was the officer's practice to always record accurately what happened in a ticket, this would ordinarily not be grounds for reversal of a conviction on the ground of insufficient evidence, unless other evidence somehow put the officer's testimony in serious doubt (e.g. a social media post clearly putting the officer in another location at the time that the ticket was allegedly issued). Normally, the only kind of evidence that would not result in a ticket being upheld on appeal would be the failure of the officer to testify at all.