What if the Police didn't read me my rights?
Let’s talk a bit here about what is perhaps the most common Traffic Stop case, a Drunk Driving charge.
Before we get to that, you undoubtedly want to know if you are stuck with this charge, or if there is way out of it. By and large, it has been my experience that most people have a pretty good gut instinct about their case. If you opened the mail one day to find a ticket for a traffic offense with your name on it for a date when you were out of the state, then you already know that the case against you isn’t very strong. If, however, you were pulled over for speeding or weaving down the road, and felt that sense of dread when you saw the lights in your rearview mirror because you knew or suspected you had one (or a few) too many, then you probably know that you’re hoping for a miracle. That’s okay too. It doesn’t hurt to ask. Together, through questions and answers on both sides, we’ll come up with the answer.
Very often, people arrested for a Drunk Driving or other Traffic Stop cases call and hope that the fact that the police didn’t read them their rights can result in their case being dismissed.
In most cases, I’m afraid, it doesn’t matter. Rather than give you the long, lawyer talk version, let’s put it this way. If you are pulled over for weaving, then arrested for drunk driving, it is unlikely that the police have any intention of using anything you said against you anyway. Drunk Driving cases are won or lost on evidence of driving while under the influence, not on what the driver says. Your breath or blood test results are the most persuasive evidence to be used for or against you.
Suspended license cases are much the same. If you are pulled over driving and your license was suspended (whether you knew it or not), nothing you say (or don’t say, for that matter) is going to change that. Even if you admit that you knew your license was suspended when you were driving, the police will have no need to include that in the case against you.
Remember the first two sentences of your rights: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
You can fill a small library with all the legal cases and discussion about those two lines, but the one legal distinction that most people don’t know about is that your rights don’t apply until you are arrested. That means, in very simple terms, that all the questioning leading up to your arrest, in most cases, is informational, and while you aren’t under any legal obligation to say anything, your rights against self-incrimination don’t even start until the police actually “arrest” you. For that matter, you could fill another small library with the legal cases and discussion about what an “arrest” is, but for our purposes, it generally means those rights don’t start running until after you have blown (or refused to blow) into the portable breathalyzer in the back of the police car and the officer has decided you’re under arrest and going to the police station.