The Right To Remain Silence Doesn’t Preclude Canadian-Talking-Torture

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday that while a person has the right to remain silent under common law, it does not prevent authorities from continuing to talk to the person in question. The ruling effectively means that authorities can continue with an interrogation long after a person has invoked their right to remain silent - even until the person being question decides to forego such legal privileges.

Anyone who has been talked at by an incessant chatterbox (forget a person trained in interrogation techniques) knows sometimes it’s easier to end the torment by just saying what the verbose talker wants than it is to endure further harassment. It will be interesting to see how such a ruling might clog the appeals court down the road with claims of confessions made under duress at the subjection to investigators who aren’t mandated to put at sock in it, especially if the green light has just been given to achieve results at any verbal cost.

Click here for more coverage on the story.

This entry was posted on November 2 2007 at 01:46 and is filed under Security Measures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.