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Confused About Your Rights?

Asking Questions is What Allows Us to Keep Civil Liberties

Close your eyes and imagine a world where an agent of the state-run school you attend can threaten to invade your privacy and tell you a falsehood about your legal right to refuse in the hope that you'll confess to a crime. Now open your eyes. Look around. You attend a school where this happens.

I know, because I was there when Sgt. Christopher Gough told everyone in my Concepts In Chemistry class that, unless one of them confessed, he would force them all to be fingerprinted. (To learn more about what happened from both Gough’s and others’ perspectives, see Stephanie Jancuik’s article in the news section.)

At that instant, I was already sad and disgusted that someone in our school would steal from a student. But when he spoke, this was overwhelmed by my shock at being treated like a criminal. I wondered if he really had the right to do this to us, and I saw from the looks on other students' faces that they were wondering the same thing. The uncertainty was distressing. For a moment, I considered whether it wouldn't be for the best if the thief were caught, even if it meant we all got our fingerprints taken against our will. I allowed myself to share in a conservative revenge fantasy, where ends justify the means, and it's ok to give up a few civil rights so long as it helps us fight crime.

Then I realized that it's this sort of paranoid thinking that paved the way for the Patriot Act and other assaults on our privacy and freedom. After a few more moments of thought, my mind cleared enough for me to realize that we didn't know who might have innocently left their fingerprints on the wallet, whether it had the fingerprints of anyone in the class or even had detectable fingerprints at all.

As a card-carrying member of the ACLU, I found Gough's threat not only offensive, but suspicious. I wasn't sure at the time, but I thought there was a good chance that he didn't have the legal right to fingerprint us all. It turns out that I was correct.

Not being the type of person who lets questions go unanswered, I went to see the only lawyer I know, Professor Anthony Ball. Ball said that, because there was no individualized suspicion, there was neither the search warrant required for forced fingerprinting nor the probable cause to get a judge to provide it. This is confirmed by no less a figure than Supreme Court Justice Sandra O’Connor, who is quoted on the ACLU web site as saying, “evenhanded treatment [is] no substitute for the individualized suspicion requirement.”

In other words, you can’t fingerprint everyone in hopes that one of the people will be guilty. You have to decide in advance, based on the evidence, who you genuinely suspect and fingerprint only them. We don’t put convicting the guilty above the civil rights of everyone else, so invading everyone’s privacy equally doesn’t work and avoids the 4^th Amendment requirements that bind the police and prevent unreasonable search and seizure.

I remembered from interviewing Gough some months ago that he had been a police officer for over a decade. I would imagine that, with this background, he would know whether or not he could legally back up his threat. Then again, I can't read his mind, so I don't know if it was intentional deception or just an error. However, in his interview with Janucik, Gough admitted that he could not require the entire class to be fingerprinted. This is not what he implied when he addressed my chemistry class.

While I can't say he knowingly lied, I can definitely say that his threat was empty. It did turn out to be a bluff, since he never did make an attempt to extract fingerprints from us all and now says he won’t. The impression that many of us got at the time, though, was that he believed he had the right to fingerprint us and that the only way we could avoid this is if, as he said, one of us confessed. In other words, it seemed as though he made this threat with the goal of getting the guilty party to confess.

Again, I can’t know whether the legal fine points slipped his mind at the time, or he misspoke, or he simply lied. However, even if he had knowingly deceived us, it’s hard to single out Gough for this behavior when police officers routinely lie to suspects to get confessions. For example, if you’re suspected of a crime, a police officer is allowed to tell you that a witness saw you, even if no such person exists.

“We’ve moved from force to fraud,” says Richard Leo, a University of California, Irvine criminologist in an Amnesty USA article on police officers and false confessions. This isn’t a matter of cops breaking the rules: they’re told to do it, and even trained how. We know these techniques work. The question we have to ask ourselves is, “Is it worth it?”

My answer is no. Agents of the state should not be allowed to lie, bluff, or in any way deceive the citizens and residents of this country. It’s better to have a country where our rights are protected, where we uphold the maxim of “It’s better to have 10 guilty men go free, than have one innocent man in jail”.

As students working hard to educate and better ourselves, we have an obligation to ask these questions. But, more importantly, we have an obligation to educate ourselves about our civil rights. If something feels wrong, we have to speak up, get the facts, and advocate for change. When speaking to the police, we can’t blindly trust them to be honest with us, so we have to rely on lawyers, since they’re paid to tell us the truth and be on our side.

As Ben Franklin said, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” If we give up liberty, we have no safety, and this is the future we face unless we stand up for our rights.

Should He Be Allowed To Lie Too?

By Amanda Evans

Date: 11/04/04