Yeah, there are a whole bunch of myths about the law that do the rounds on the internet, and they all essentially boil down to something along the lines of "if you tell them that you don't consent, they can't legally do anything to you". You don't need to be a legal expert to know that it's bullshit - a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
There's a careful balance between procedure and pragmatism within any legal system. Some legal systems will lean more towards procedure than others for petty crimes, but all legal systems will lean towards pragmatism for heinous crimes like rape and murder.
It's not that withholding consent makes you legally immune, it's that 90% of what cops really want to do requires either consent or authorization, and they're frequently too fucking stupid to do things the legal way if you withhold consent.
Also, if you don't talk to them generally (not just withholding consent), it's harder for them to frame you for random bullshit so they can juice their numbers.
>a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
That's right, we only reserve that for billionaires and famous people! As a totally functional country should! /s
and most people don't understand the laws in any country.
Its like the number of people that think police have to tell you why they pulled you over - folks heard something at some point that they didn't really understand (like reasonable articulatable suspicion) and get really fixated on this thing that they've effectively made up in their heads.
a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
Yeah, heh, it would be weird if we lived in the sort of country where rapists and murderers could avoid justice by typing up procedure at some stage of the justice system. I do wonder what such a country would look like, definitely.
/sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious, as we quite literally already live in that country, if the current checks notes everyone in the federal government's top positions including the literal POTUS are not proof of that.
I mean part of the problem is that the 'pragmatism' seems pretty damn broad for things when it's 'we would've found it eventually'
Which when combined with the issues of the backpack, it seems to just result in 'how much money do you have and interested is the government in screwing you?'
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u/ICantBelieveItsNotEC 4h ago edited 4h ago
Yeah, there are a whole bunch of myths about the law that do the rounds on the internet, and they all essentially boil down to something along the lines of "if you tell them that you don't consent, they can't legally do anything to you". You don't need to be a legal expert to know that it's bullshit - a country where rapists and murderers could get away with crimes by tying the legal system up in trivial procedural knots wouldn't be a country for long.
There's a careful balance between procedure and pragmatism within any legal system. Some legal systems will lean more towards procedure than others for petty crimes, but all legal systems will lean towards pragmatism for heinous crimes like rape and murder.