You Have the Right to Remain Silent Part III: Phone Calls from Jail

This one seems too obvious to have to say, but unfortunately here we are. If you use the telephone in custody, there is a recording advising you that the phone call is being recorded. That message is not a joke; they are recording your telephone calls. The message could not be clearer. Do not talk about your case over the jail phones. In many, if not most, cases, criminal defense lawyers are given hours and hours of client phone calls, which means they said something they should not have. Save me the agony of listening to every call you have made over a 6-month period by not talking about your case over the phone.

A couple quick stories and a piece of advice:

In one case, my client's boyfriend called her from the local county jail and instructed her step by step over the telephone in how to commit a crime. He guided her through it and even told her what to say to the victims when she arrived. Throughout the recording, which I was given by the prosecution, you could clearly hear the message saying that the call was being recorded. The entire crime from beginning to end was recorded on a jail line. This client ended up taking an offer.

In another case, my client was charged with murder. After the crime, my client's brother called from custody to ask if he had done it. In answering what sounded like a suspicious question, my client gave 3 different analogies describing the same thing. The advice not to mix your metaphors is never more true than when you are hoping someone might take your metaphor literally. You may have convinced someone that you had gone fishing, but once you also say you hit the ball, and that you hit the nail, everyone knows you did none of those things. It starts to look like maybe what you actually did is kill someone. Most of the time when people think they are outsmarting the system, they are only outsmarting themselves. Use the phones to catch up with your loved ones not to talk about your case. Same goes if someone calls you from custody, same goes if someone calls you from custody using someone else's booking number when they place the call. You aren't going to get away with it, you will only make my job harder. I love a challenging case, but my clients typically don't when the challenging case is theirs.

Don't Confess Over the Telephone, Please.