INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE. The Police and Their Foolish Confidants.

Free Lance, Volume II, Issue 55, 20 July 1901, Page 8

INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE. The Police and Their Foolish Confidants.

SOMEONE has at last pointed out in Court that statements made by offenders against the law to the police should not be used as evidence against them. Oftentimes a policeman takes upon himself the onus of cross-examining an accused person, who may, if the guardian of the peace be a skilful questioner, give himself badly away before the case comes before the proper authorities to extract information. The self-constitution of a policeman to a sort of one man court of enquiry, or unauthorised counsel for the prosecution may help the questioning constable to promotion, but the matter is a serious one for the accused, whose statements, previous to his appearance before the magisterial bench are carefully noted, and frequently brought as damning evidence of guilt. A policeman is, of course, human, with the frailties of ununiformed brethren, and one of the the frailties of man is to advance his own interests in his own particular sphere of life. • • » No one will abuse the police for a reasonable desire to climb to giddy official heights, but there is no clause in the multitude of our statutes that gives him a license to hold a hearing of a case by himself, and constitute himself the judge and jury and counsel for the prosecution. There is, however, no means by which an accused person can be forced to incriminate himself in the hearing of any officer of the peace, and the frequently - recurring cases in which offenders are convicted on the evidence of the police, as the result of their confidences to them, should be a warning to them to keep aloof from the blandishments of the blue. If it is not customary, it is correct for the police, in interviews with accused persons, to sound a warning that any statements made may probably be used against them. A person is considered innocent until a court finds him guilty, but he is frequently discovered to be guilty by the police because, in a burst of confidence as man to man, he has told Eobert a thing or two. • • * Robert tells the thing or two with deadly effect against his confidant, and as he is a good conduct man well into the " straight " for stripes, and as the accused cannot deny having made the statements, often his chance of establishing a claim to innocence (though he may not be so) is lost. This, of course, is not right When the police do wheedle information out of an accused person, the information thus obtained can be legally used against the person thus wheedled, and it is the person's own fault who makes a friend of " the bobby," if Bobby uses it as a stepping-stone to an inspectorship. Judges have recently said that the police should not be too ready to extract information, but it is hardly likely that the police will take any notice of such advice. • • • If advice was tendered to persons who, perhaps, knew they were guilty but did not want to say so, it should be that they made no statement that the police could hang a conviction on. In the case of a young and ambitious officer, he looks to promotion from the number of his cases. He naturally hates nocturnal "drunks, because he has to attend Court in the morning when he should be in bed. This, of course, makes him as savage as the ordinary doctor who is aroused at midnight, or the fireman who is called to extinguish a llfd curtain. But the same young constable is not going to kill his chances of a "district," a Court clerkship, or an amateur C.P -ship, by not exercising his powers of cross-examination when he gets a nice, clean, easy chance, without it keeping him out of bed.