Understanding your Miranda rights is a crucial part of knowing how to interact with police in interrogations or interviews safely.
What exactly are your Miranda rights, though? What do they protect?
Avoid self-incrimination
Miranda Warning discusses your Miranda rights. These protect your ability to avoid self-incrimination. What is self-incrimination? This is the act of giving law enforcement potentially incriminating evidence, verbally or otherwise, that might end up used against you in a court case.
Police sometimes try to dissuade people from utilizing their Miranda rights by insisting that only guilty parties do this. However, anyone can accidentally self-incriminate, including innocent parties. In the end, it boils down to whether or not a person has a good handle on knowing how to interact with the police.
When you invoke your Miranda rights, you invoke your right to remain silent, and your right to legal representation.
Your right to remain silent essentially allows you to avoid speaking with officers in an interrogation until you have legal representation available.
Protect your rights
It is important to note that they can still use the things you say against you even after you invoke your rights. Thus, once you invoke them, you need to actually remain silent so that they cannot use what you say against you.
Your Miranda rights also protect you by providing you with legal representation from the state if you cannot afford representation on your own. Attorneys are often costly, so this is a valuable service for many who could not otherwise afford one.
Together, these provide valuable help for people who need it.
