Back to the motion on the table; it is possible to be detained without being arrested. The note in the Miranda Rights says an officer can in essence, fail to inform the detainee of Miranda Rights but SPECIFIC EVIDENCE gleaned from the INTERVIEW MAY NOT BE USED in a CRIMINAL TRIAL. The defense wants to hide something crucial.
Logan Wellbright on FCS seems to think this motion is par for the course in delaying the trial. If the defendant is truly looking to beat this case and suppress the damning evidence, I think we're looking at a future plea bargain.
Lolo, hope you don't mind if I appreciate your ideas but respectfully don't quite agree.
Thank you for pointing me to the post Logan added to the FCS site. I was wondering why there was not an update. Logan Wainwright is extremely well spoken (is he an attorney?). It feels good to see that the points Logan made were the same points I made here, thinking it through.
Yes, it is possible to be detained without arrest, but that didn't happen here. SC was not in fact detained, and his attorney isn't arguing he was detained. Attorney is arguing that SC FELT like he had no choice, which is about SC's perception rather than the actual situation. That's not going to hold up. The overall situation doesn't support that SC would be detained or coerced at that point. As I said yesterday, and LW says, there was NO EVIDENCE a crime had been committed when SC was questioned. The concern was valid based on knowledge of how Charli would not go off without communicating. That is not evidence, and even if she had come to harm, they were at the time searching for a car accident. Her car was not found and no physical evidence had been found showing violence occurred. Police are notoriously conservative about missing persons cases of adults. It wasn't for almost a month that it became a homicide investigation. He was just very sensitive about cops, probably because he was so guilty and already leading a life of the petty criminal.
As Logan says, the law wants the guilt-proving evidence to be admissible to the court; that's the basic point of having a trial, to hear that type of evidence. It won't be suppressed just because it's not in his best interest to have it presented at trial. Miranda rights mean that if he is detained, they have to inform him of his right to be silent and talk to an attorney. They don't have to do that when they are questioning a guy who is legally free to go.
I think you're reading too much into the motion. Defense is going to throw out possible motions at any step. There's no penalty for it unless they have no merit and are a total waste of the court's time. The attorney is going to try every time there is an opening. It doesn't need to be a winner, and it doesn't need to be crucial evidence. Maybe it is; obviously it is something that incriminates SC, but there's a lot of leeway between potentially incriminating and damning. It's in SC's best interest to have all his statements suppressed, if he could.
Of course the defendant would like to suppress all damning evidence, and will try, but if the evidence was obtained properly the D will try and fail, so it goes.
It's SOP to offer a plea bargain if conviction is not certain, especially circumstantial evidence cases. A bird in the hand worth two in the bush. Big stakes in a murder trial, as we know. He cannot be tried again if he is found not guilty. Then he would be free. They have to first and foremost make sure he gets a sentence and doesn't go free, but they have time to see how the trial goes. They wouldn't offer a good plea deal at the beginning.
We don't know much at all over in the cheap seats about how admissible the evidence will be. It's just wait and see what gets challenged and how that goes. Is it good to delay the trial with tactics? I guess so. It makes the trial more expensive to the taxpayers, and that is always being tallied, cost versus benefits. BUT it's a heinous high profile murder, and public outcry would be huge if they threw in the towel for that reason.
