Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and SAFE. You may qualify for an 18% discount. Visit sdge.com/fera to find out more. Good afternoon and welcome to the Cato Institute. We're glad you could come inside and join us on this beautiful day in Washington. My name is Tim Lynch.

I'm the director of Cato's project on criminal justice. Today we want to welcome Professor James Duane to speak about his important new book, "You Have the Right to Remain Innocent," how police officers tell their children about the Fifth Amendment. I also want to welcome Professor Randy Barnett, who will be offering comments on the book.

I'd like to take just a minute or two to lay something of a foundation for today's discussion, but before I do that, let me ask you to double-check your cell phones and make sure that they are silenced as a courtesy to our speakers. Thank you. One of the ideas we advance here at Cato is that the Constitution needs to be actively defended.

The Constitution is just words on paper if people do not make an effort to read it, to understand it, and then to defend it. So to get more people involved with the Constitution, some years ago we published these pocket constitutions, and we have distributed millions of copies of these pocket constitutions all around the United States and indeed around the world.

And if you look over the Bill of Rights, you'll find that many of the provisions there deal with the criminal justice system. You'll see references to the jury trial, speedy trial, your right to confront witnesses, and other provisions. But by the time somebody is facing trial, they're already going to have an attorney who is kind of holding their hand and walking them through the system, giving them advice on things that they should do and things that they shouldn't do.

So today we're going to be talking about some provisions of the Bill of Rights that come into play well before trial. This is when you are alone with a police officer or a government regulator. The Fourth Amendment deals with searches and seizures. The Fifth Amendment deals with self-incrimination. And the Sixth Amendment deals with your right to an attorney.

And the thing is, is government agents are trained in techniques to get citizens to waive these rights. And many people get into deep trouble, sometimes because they don't want to be perceived as being uncooperative with the authorities, but they're also not sure what to do and how to handle themselves under intense pressure.

The police tell people all the time that things are going to go worse for you unless you cooperate and be cooperative with them and tell them the things that they want to know. There have been so many incidents in the past few years, incidents caught on tape, where there's some minor interaction, encounter between a citizen and the police over something small like a traffic stop, and then things quickly escalate and spiral out of control and there's a violent arrest or some other bad outcome.

So I think this book is very timely. Another point I want to make is the spider web of rules and regulations has become so vast that almost everybody, whether they realize it or not, can get tripped up by criminal rules that they may not even be aware of. We're seeing this sometimes increasingly in our schools, where past behaviors that were commonly handled by teachers and principals, increasingly it seems the police are being brought in to handle behaviors in our schools.

And it goes from school kids right up to CEOs, governors, and even our presidential contenders. If you just look at the news the past few weeks, we have aides to Governor Chris Christie in New Jersey that are now on trial in federal court over Bridgegate. And you know from the news that Hillary Clinton and her aides have been investigated by the FBI for mishandling classified information.

So there's this web of rules out there that can trip up ordinary citizens and even powerful governors and other people in the business world. These are dangerous times because even when a totally innocent person prevails at trial and the jury says not guilty, chances are their savings and reputation, even though they've been found guilty, is shattered.

To avoid this nightmare, Professor Duane has written a book with great practical advice. And one of the cool things about Professor Duane is he's the only law professor that I'm aware of who has a distinction of becoming a YouTube sensation. His 2008 lecture, "Never Talk to the Police," has been viewed more than 20 million times, according to the publisher.

And the thing is, this is well-deserved attention. This isn't some silly thing that some of these viral videos-- It's not a cat video. Yes, it's not one of these cat or dog videos that goes viral. This is well-deserved attention. It's a terrific lecture that I've been recommending to people for years.

So when I heard that Professor Duane had written a new book on how people can protect themselves from government overreaching, I quickly invited him to come here to Cato so we could help draw attention to his work, and I'm so glad that he accepted. The book is just out, but he has also already received glowing endorsements from many top legal academics from around the country.

As far as his background, he has been teaching a variety of legal subjects-- evidence, civil procedure, trial practice--at the Regent Law School for more than 25 years, where he has received many awards for teaching excellence. So please welcome the author of "You Have the Right to Remain Innocent," James Duane.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Tim, very much for that introduction, and thank you for the invitation to be here today. I'm honored to be able to play my small part in promoting the work of the Cato Institute in defense of American civil and constitutional liberties, about which I am passionately concerned.

And so please accept my apologies in advance if I seem to get a little worked up and passionate about this, because I am. Here's the book that he mentioned a moment ago, "You Have the Right to Remain Innocent." As it says up there, it's also available in audio version if you'd like to have the thrill of hearing me read the book to you and to your children as they're getting ready for bed.

A couple of brief--before I talk about the book, let me just make a couple of quick, brief introductory comments about myself. For the benefit of those of you who are thinking to yourself, "Well, who is this guy? Why should I listen to him? Why should I care about his opinion?" That's a fair question.

I'm nobody of any particular stature, but I know some important people. There's Justice Antonin Scalia and me, a picture of us taken together in his chambers, actually just a few months before his tragic and untimely demise. Just before we went out to lunch together, he was--I'm a great admirer of that man.

He was a legal giant. And here, for those of you on the left, is my friend Loretta Lynch, the U.S. Attorney General, and me, posing together at our recent college reunion. We were college and law school classmates, and I'm also a great fan of hers as well. I'm not sure, but I think I may be the only American who actually hugged Loretta and Nino both in the past year.

But I need to give you a little trigger warning. For those of you who are fans of one or the other, I need to warn you right up front that before I'm done, I'm going to have some somewhat irreverent things to say about them both, or at least about the Obama administration in the era called the Justice Department, and Justice Scalia, and the conservative branch of the Supreme Court, and how it is that they have almost nothing in common except for one thing, that they don't understand the Fifth Amendment, and they don't care deeply enough about its extraordinary value to you and me and to every other American citizen.

As Tim mentioned a moment ago, I'm honored to be able to say that the book has attracted some great praise from Alex Kaczynski, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and a half dozen other prominent individuals. You can read their glowing endorsements on the Amazon web page. One of them, Professor Larry Tribe from Harvard Law School, was kind enough to write that "This book's amazing but true stories of innocent people exonerated after decades of wrongful imprisonment, which they could have avoided if they had insisted on their fundamental right to avoid self-incrimination, are riveting reminders of the high price we pay as individuals and as a society when we fail to assert our constitutional rights." That's what the book is all about.

Educating the American public so that you and they will all come to understand how critical it is that we understand and be unashamed and unapologetic, full-throated, publicly even, in our vigorous defense of our constitutional rights, not ashamed in the presence of the police who are trying to coerce you or manipulate you into thinking there was something underhanded about asserting your rights or standing up for your rights.

Believe me, when the shoe is on the other foot and they find themselves on the other end of the table and they're told that they're being investigated by the Internal Affairs, or when Lois Lerner is told that Congress wants to do some investigating into the certain mis-proprieties apparently being committed by her office, she clams up in a heartbeat and takes the Fifth Amendment and then goes to collect her pension.

Since this video went viral about eight years ago, I have been deluged almost every day with hundreds, probably thousands of emails and letters from all kinds of people with all kinds of questions. I haven't got time to answer all of them today. We've also got some questions coming in live on Twitter, and I'll only be able to answer about 20 of them.

But I will answer, for your benefit, about 20 of the most important questions that I've received or that many of you may be wondering about this book. Question number one that I've often asked, my motivation. Why did you write this book? Was it for the money? Is that why you're in it?

Absolutely and emphatically not. In fact, shame on you for even supposing such a thing. Anybody who knows the truth of the matter, you'll be embarrassed when you find out the truth. Under the terms of my royalty arrangement with Amazon Publishing, which I actually have no obligation to make public, but under the terms of my unusual royalty arrangement with Amazon Publishing, I will not receive one dime in revenue or income or money of any kind after we have sold the first 500 million copies.

After that point in time, every dime that would have gone to me instead will be shunted directly into a charitable, not-for-profit personal foundation called the Duane Family Foundation. It was set up for my benefit by the same attorneys and accountants who are working for the Clinton Foundation, and every bit of that money will be ostensibly earmarked for the public benefit after the first 90% is spent on opulent travel and trips for me and my family around the world.

And let me also underscore on a more serious note, I did not write this book, and I have not made this cause my apparent life's project for the benefit of making money for criminal defense attorneys. On YouTube, there have been thousands of things written about me, various comments. I don't have time to read them all, I'm happy to say.

Probably good for my benefit that I don't. Most of them are very much in agreement. Very few of them are actually critical or express any kind of disagreement. But far and away, the number one most common criticism that I do get when I do get blowback is from people who say dismissively, "Well, of course, he'll say you need to ask for a lawyer.

He's a lawyer himself." Well, in all seriousness, these people have no idea how far they are from the mark because this book and the promotion of the theme behind this book is by no means to make more money for criminal defense attorneys. Quite the opposite. If this book can somehow be placed in the hands of every young person in America, I can absolutely and unconditionally guarantee you that the number of criminal defense attorneys who will have too many cases to handle will suddenly and dramatically decline.

There will be much less work for criminal defense attorneys, including myself, to handle if we can get people at the front end to wise up and to smarten up and to keep their mouth shut. So why did I write the book? In all seriousness, I'll tell you why. My motivation is twofold.

Number one, because this country is convicting far too many innocent people for crimes that they did not commit. It ought to be a national scandal. It ought to be a national disgrace. It seems almost once a week you pick up the paper and you read about some poor schlep, more often than not, a member of a racial minority who's let out of prison because 20 years after he was sentenced to a life term, we find DNA evidence that now where the belatedly confirms apparently, whoops, we got the wrong guy.

We give this guy our apologies. We pat him on the back. We give him a small check, and then we forget all about him. And then we turn our attention back to Brangelina or some other exciting thing in the news. No, we ought to call a national timeout, and we ought to ask what in the world, what in God's name are we doing?

How is it that on our watch so many innocent people are being convicted? How many? We don't even know for sure. We all know about the extraordinary work being done by the Innocence Project, which has already worked laboriously to secure the release of over 340 innocent men and women convicted of horrible crimes, some of them a death row, before they were ultimately released and proved to be innocent.

That program is also, by the way, run by a former classmate of mine, Mattie DeLong. Hi, Mattie. I admire greatly the work that they're doing at the Innocence Project. I yield to nobody in my admiration for the work they do, but it is a national scandal that they should be doing this work at all.

I'm trying to do my part to supplement her efforts at the front end by trying to see to it that fewer people get convicted for crimes that they did not commit. And I guarantee you that if enough young people read this book, there is no question that we will start convicting immediately fewer innocent people.

We will have fewer false convictions. How many? Nobody can say for sure. But even if there's only a few, then all the work that I did on this book will have been time well spent. And the other thing, my other related motivation, is to bring to an end once and for all the absolutely obscene and hypocritical double standard, the discrepancy, the grotesque discrepancy, between what police officers tell your children and tell you every day, all night, all over the country, and what they go home and privately tell their own children.

I'm not trying to impugn their honesty or their integrity as a general matter, as I emphatically emphasize in the book. It's nothing personal. I'm not trying to suggest that police officers by and large are less honorable or honest than your average individual on the street. They're just doing what they've been trained to do ever since they started on the job.

At the police academy from day one, they're given sophisticated training on elaborate methods of deception and trickery and dishonesty in ways that are designed to get guilty and innocent people both to talk and to make admissions, damaging admissions that can be used to help convict them, in some cases of crimes that they didn't even commit.

And then when they get on the job and they start using these tactics, they get nothing but ratification, support, confirmation, and corroboration from the courts that are routinely giving them a nice, "Well done, attaboy, good job, you did it again. We'll allow this confession to be used even though you told this guy the most unspeakable lies.

Well done, officer. Now you get back to work and keep on doing it." And yet when these same officers go at home at night, how do they sleep on themselves? I'll tell you how they sleep. They go at home, they get home, and they open the door and they say to the wife, "Hey, hey, where are the kids?

Where are the twins?" And the kids come running into the room and they grab the kids in the room and they say, "Come here, come here, Jennifer, Joel." And with tears running down their face, the police officers say to the kids, "Promise me for the love of God that as long as you live, you will never let any police officer do to you what I do to other people's kids all day long." And it sounds like a joke, but it really is an accurate paraphrase of the reality.

I've been all over the country talking to thousands of young people in the past five years about this subject everywhere I go without exception. I ask every audience, anybody here have a mom or a dad who's a police officer or a prosecutor? There's always one or two. I ask them every time, "What do your parents tell you about the Fifth Amendment?" Every time, no exception, 100% of them say they said the same thing.

They told me when I was a young kid, very young, don't ever talk to the police. Don't ever agree to talk to them. If the police say, "Can I ask you a couple of questions?" You say no. That's why the subtitle of this book is, "Will Police Officers Tell Their Own Children About the Fifth Amendment?" Next question.

The most common question I get in email, I get this one all the time, "What about traffic stops? Is it okay if I talk to a police officer during the course of a routine traffic stop?" Yes. All right, let's just get that out of the way quickly. At the risk of stating what ought to be obvious, that is completely different in 100 obvious ways, not the least of which is the fact that the police officers have virtually unbridled discretion to let you off with a warning this time and let you go without giving you a ticket if it seems to them that you're not a public menace, that you aren't drunk, that you are suitably respectful and courteous.

That's not going to happen with a murder investigation. They're not going to let you off because you seem to be really sorry for what you have done. But I will give you this one little bit of free legal advice. When you do get stopped and pulled over by the police, you shouldn't talk any more than necessary.

Don't allow them to get you in a conversation about what you did wrong or whether you know what you did wrong. Just tell them, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to do anything wrong. I didn't mean to violate the law, and if I did, I appreciate you bringing it to my attention, officer." If they suspect that you have been driving while intoxicated and they ask you if you could recite the alphabet backwards, you don't get into a long conversation or an argument of any sort, just say this, just say, "ZYXWVUTSRQPO NMLKGISGFEDCBA." And then you say, "No, officer.

I need to ask you if you can do that in two seconds because I need to warn you if you can. I'm putting you under a sentence arrest, and I'll need to ask you to keep your hands where I can see them at all times." Now, let me quickly summarize for you the main points that you'll be able to get out of this book if you buy the book and if you read it.

I don't have time, I'm sorry to say, to give you all the details and everything that's in the book, but maybe that's good because then you wouldn't buy it. But here are the most important points behind the book. There are three. Number one, the reason I'm writing this book is to make sure that everybody who reads the book will come to understand that the Fifth Amendment is just as precious, just as valuable for innocent people as it is for the guilty.

And once upon a time, this was well known, once upon a time at least, among the educated, 50 years ago, the US Supreme Court handed down about a dozen different opinions in which they reaffirmed again and again and again that there's nothing terribly incriminating about the fact that someone chooses to exercise the Fifth, that innocent people, perhaps even more than the guilty, have ample reason, numerous reasons, to observe the Fifth Amendment, and therefore no particularly probative inferences either way can be drawn from the fact that somebody chose to remain silent.

To those who understand how the system really works, the fact that somebody chose not to talk to the police is no more reliable evidence of guilt than the fact that he also asked for breakfast every morning while he was in custody, just like all the guilty people do. Yeah, sure they do, but so do the innocent.

Number two, you have no idea, unless you've got at least 20 years of experience in the criminal justice system in America today, you have no idea how many different ways there are in which you can get yourself convicted of some crime that you did not commit. Or worse yet, perhaps, some crime you never even heard of or ever in your wildest dream would ever imagine could be a crime, just by talking to the police.

And number three, you will not believe, and I dare say most readers of the book will be literally astounded at how complicated and how hazardous it has become now in recent years, in just the last three years, for you to exercise the Fifth Amendment. Let me give you a little bit of additional detail about all of those points.

Next question, who needs to read this book? Well, there are two groups of individuals. You're wondering, am I the guy who needs to read this book? Well, yes, you are, absolutely, without a doubt. There are two groups of individuals who absolutely need to read this book, and they need to read it before it's too late.

The first group is potential criminal suspects, not necessarily guilty, guilty or innocent. If there's any possibility that someday, perhaps soon, perhaps in the distant future, perhaps when you least expect it, the police may find themselves in possession of evidence that persuades them maybe you were involved in or know something about a crime, maybe it was a crime you never heard of, which is not unlikely, which is not unusual.

The federal government today has over 10,000 criminal statutes on the books, when you count all the tens of thousands of criminal federal regulations that are incorporated by reference into the terms of the U.S. Penal Code. And who is that, by the way? Who in this room is somebody who might someday be a potential criminal suspect?

Of course, the answer is everybody. You can't comfort yourself with the assurance that, well, I know in my heart I'll never do anything wrong. That doesn't matter. Maybe some mistaken or confused but sincere and credible-sounding eyewitness might mistakenly identify you as somebody who was there. Maybe you were there at the scene.

Doesn't mean you were involved, but you're one of the leads. You may be the only lead that they've got. If you are a potential criminal suspect, you need to read this book. Or if any of your children might someday become a criminal suspect, they need to read this book before they are taken into custody.

Or before, more likely, the police don't take them into custody, but simply say, you might come down to the office on a voluntary basis, down to the station. You're not under arrest. It's strictly voluntary. You can leave at any time. They like to say this to your kids, to deceive them, to get the kid's guard down.

Sometimes it's grotesquely deceptive because sometimes they won't tell the kid that the truth is we've already got a pretty solid identification of you as the suspect from a witness who may be mistaken, but the police don't know that. And they already know that no matter how this interview ends, your kid will be put in handcuffs and he will be taken away and put in jail, but they don't tell the kid that because they're hoping first we can get him to voluntarily cooperate, waive his rights and talk to us, and we don't have to give him the Miranda warnings if he's not technically in custody.

At that point, your kid won't know anything about what's going down because you won't have time to get a hold of him and you won't have time to put this book in his hands. And if you call the police office and say, you mind if I talk to the kid, they'll lie to you and they'll say, no, we can't arrange that, it's a lie, because they could if they wanted, they just won't.

And if the kid says, is it okay if I get a lawyer, can I maybe get a lawyer, very often they'll lie and say, no, we don't need that, we don't want that, you don't want that, which is a lie because a lawyer could be arranged if they wanted to do that for you.

The other group of individuals who really needs to read this book is everybody in this room or in this audience who might someday find themselves in a jury. Potential jurors need to be able to read this book and you need to read it before it's too late so that you can explain to the other members of the jury.

If somebody back there in the jury room is trying to insinuate, boy, you notice that guy, he didn't testify at the trial. I guess that's a pretty clear indication that he probably did it. No, absolutely not. As I mentioned in the book, one important study of over 100 people who were exonerated after they had been falsely convicted of something they did not do revealed that almost half of them, approximately 40% of them, didn't testify at their trial.

And these are people that we now know were in fact absolutely innocent. So if you find yourself, you might be in either one of those groups, you need to read this book. And almost every one of us could of course be in group number two. Any one of us could someday become a member of a jury unless of course perhaps you have a felony conviction, then you probably won't be in a jury.

But if you have a felony conviction, you're twice as likely to find yourself in group number one. So either way, you've got to read the book. Next question I frequently get, I often get this one. Well, if I take the fifth vote, won't that look suspicious? Won't the police think that I look guilty if I take the fifth?

The good news, the answer is no. Emphatically no. Absolutely not. You will not look guilty to the police. And why do I say that? Because the police know from years of experience that truth be told, most suspects probably are guilty and most guilty criminals are not that smart. Some of them are stupid.

And most stupid people waive the right to remain silent. Okay, so if you want to look like a guilty person, you want to open your mouth and start talking. Talk if need be for eight, ten, twelve hours. That's what guilty people usually do. You see, it's absolutely false to suppose that there's two groups of people out there.

There's the guilty ones who keep quiet and the smart ones, I'm sorry, the innocent ones who talk. That's what most laymen mistakenly suppose, but that's not true and the police know that it's not true. No, the reality is there's two groups of individuals out there. There are those who are sophisticated enough to understand how the American criminal justice system works.

This includes, by the way, every defense attorney, every prosecutor, every police officer, every judge, and all of their children and nieces and nephews. Those people never talk to the police. Period. And then there's this other group that waives the right to remain silent and does talk. And that group includes a lot of guilty people and a lot of innocent people.

But all they have in common is that they don't know how the system works. But although the police won't think you look guilty, they will pretend that they think that because they know that's how you think. And they will pretend that they believe it themselves to help trick you into talking with them.

As Tim said a few minutes ago, a common tactic, a very common tactic that is used by the police is to start insinuating things. Oh, you want to take the fifth? You want a lawyer? Why? What have you got to hide? Why would an innocent person want to exercise the right to remain silent?

The next time a cop tells you that, you just hand him a copy of this book and don't say another word. Say, "Read the book and you'll understand." He won't need to read the book. He already understands. He's lying to you. That's what they do. What about the jury?

What about the jurors? If the jurors learn that you told the police that you would not answer their questions, will they think you look sort of guilty? Will they think that may be evidence of guilt? Will I need to be honest with you? Yes, they probably will. Tragically, sadly, unfortunately, yes.

You don't have to take my word for it. More than 50 years ago, the Supreme Court of the United States of America said that too many people, even those who ought to know better, too often assume that the invocation of the Fifth Amendment privilege is tantamount to a confession of guilt.

And it's still true to this day. Indeed, as I'll show you in a few minutes, that's even tragically now become a description of a majority of the justices on our U.S. Supreme Court. Unless luckily for you, one of the members of the jury has read this book and can explain to the others, no, it's not what you think.

There are lots of innocent people out there who take the fifth all the time, including 100% of the police and 100% of their kids. Until recently, that was not even an issue. The famous viral video that Mr. Lynch mentioned a moment ago, which has been seen over 10 million times, I've got to find some way to get that offline.

Because when I made that talk eight years ago, there was no need for me to get into the details, as this book does, about how you do and how you don't want to assert the Fifth or exercise the Fifth Amendment privilege. It wasn't really a thing. It wasn't an issue.

Up until five years ago, just about 100% of all the criminal defense attorneys in the country regularly told their clients, listen, here's what you say. It's printed on the back of my business card. On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me.

It seemed like harmless fun. It didn't really matter how you said it or what you said, because the universal consensus up until a few years ago was the jury would never find out that you said anything at all. In the Miranda decision, almost exactly 50 years ago today, the U.S.

Supreme Court took it as evidence, self-evident, that of course you can't use it against the defendant that he chose to assert his right to remain silent, or even that he stood mute in the face of police interrogation, because that was not logical or legal or constitutional. But oh my goodness, how far we have come, as I'll explain in just a few minutes.

As I will explain to you, and as the book explains in much greater detail, unfortunately, in just the last several years, the exercise of the Fifth Amendment has now become a veritable minefield that must be very, very carefully navigated. The good news is that it's not hard to do.

The bad news is I don't have time to tell you how to do it. You'll have to get the book. And help me finance the operations of the Duane Family Foundation. Here's some of the key points that you will learn in this book when you get the chance to pick it up.

I will share with you in the book the astounding and dishonest tricks and tactics that our police officers use all over the country, all day, every day, and all night too, to deceive you and your family and your young people into thinking it is in your best interest to talk.

You'll be amazed at some of the examples, many examples in here, of incredible deceptions and falsehoods that were told by police officers, criminal suspects, to get them to waive their right to remain silent. Telling them things such as, "Oh, you're not really a suspect. You're one of ours. You're on our side.

We're going to use you as a prosecution witness and Johnny against the other kids. You're on our team. This is off the record. We won't use it against you. We won't tell anybody about it. We're not recording this. We know you're not a murderer. We know you're not guilty of any crime.

We know you didn't do it. We know you weren't there." You can easily understand how after five, six, seven hours, if need be, of unrelenting interrogation, assurances like these could easily break down the will of even an innocent, exasperated suspect to think, "Well, if it's off the record and they say they're not going to prosecute me, what have I got to lose?

Apparently I've got to tell them whatever they want me to say if that's what I've got to do to get out of here." And then they find themselves 20 years later fighting frantically with the help of the Innocence Project to prove that they were innocent all along. And as the book explains, psychological research has confirmed that these tactics, tragically and paradoxically, are most effective on the innocent, even more so than on the guilty.

Because innocent people who know in their heart that they weren't there and didn't do it are the ones who are most likely to deceive themselves into thinking, "Well, if this is what I've got to say, they want me to say that I was there and that I was involved, I'll say it, but then I'll get a great lawyer for myself.

I'll hire one of those great, fast-talking lawyers on YouTube and he'll be able to get me off. That ain't going to happen. Once you've made a confession that's on videotape and then it contains details that only the real killer would have known, which the police will be sure to take care of every time, there's very little a fast-talking YouTube lawyer can do to get you off.

It'll almost never happen." In the book, you will also learn why you cannot and must not believe one word from the mouth of a police officer who's trying to get you to waive your rights. And I mean literally, not one word. The examples in the book will blow your mind of the things that they're allowed to get away with by the courts.

In one case that is described in the book, read the case of a family that was trying to find out what had happened to their daughter who had recently been abducted. Unbeknownst to them, the police mistakenly suspected that the father might have been involved in her abduction, which by the way is not unusual because one police officer recently told a friend of mine that nine times out of ten, the one who calls in the crime is the one who did it, which is not true.

But that's what you're up against in the mind of some police officers. If you call them just as a witness, you have no idea whether you're just a witness. They'll tell you, "Oh, we know you're just a witness. We know you weren't involved, but you can't believe what these people say." In the case from Illinois that I mentioned a moment ago, the police officers, unbeknownst to the parents, found the girl's body drowned, dead.

But they weren't yet done with their investigation. They thought that the father might be involved. They wanted to question him, but they didn't want to tell her that she was dead and that he was a suspect and that he was in custody because then they'd have to read him his rights.

So they didn't even tell the parents the girl had been found. Pretending, falsely, that they were still engaged in an effort to find her alive, they took advantage of his good intentions. They took advantage of the fact that he would naturally want to cooperate with them in what he thought was an ongoing investigation to recover this girl.

And he went down to the station and they questioned him for more than an hour, trying to extract from him anything they could use to pin the murder on him without even telling him that the girl was dead. My friends, you need to understand, the next time you make the mistake of going downtown for a voluntary interview and you let them shut that door, you have no idea whether your loved ones are dead or alive.

You have no idea whether your loved ones are in the next room saying, "I've got a lawyer here and the lawyer wants to meet with him. And I've hired a lawyer and the lawyer's right here too." The police will say, "Sorry, he hasn't asked for a lawyer yet, so we're not obligated to put the two of them together.

And no, we don't have to tell your kid that there's a lawyer out here that you've hired to represent him." You have no idea what's going on outside that door. But the good news is, nobody who reads this book will ever go through that door again because you've gone to the other side of the looking glass if you make that horrible mistake.

You will also learn in this book the incredibly dishonest things that our judicial system routinely says to excuse the dishonesty on the part of the police. You'll read about cases in this book where police officers said the most grotesquely sort of deceptive and disingenuous things to criminal suspects, saying, "Oh, we know you're not a murderer.

If you didn't premeditate this, if it was an impulsive, sudden thing, that's no big deal. That was a promise that was given to somebody in Illinois, a young man who was then prosecuted for murder and sentenced to prison for 45 years after he was told by the police, 'Oh, that's not a big deal.' And the court said, 'Oh, we don't see how that could be construed as a promise of leniency,' which is ridiculous and preposterous and painfully false.

And the court knew that it was, but that's what they had to say to affirm the conviction, and that's what they said. You can't trust the courts to protect your rights and to defend your rights. You've got to stand up for yourself. You've got to stand up for your own rights, and you've got to know what they are.

Another key point that you'll get out of the book. In the book, you'll read the reading test, or if you've got the audio version, the listening test that everybody fails. In this book, I've got a short paragraph of facts that you'll be asked to read, and then a short list of questions, only four that you'll be asked to answer about the very short set of facts that you were just given.

I've used this same test on over a thousand people around the country in the past five years, and everybody gets it wrong. Everybody. 99.9%. And you will too, believe it or not. And then you will see how I go on to explain how it is that this fact about human nature, the fact that our memories kind of trick us sometimes into thinking that we've read something or heard something.

The truth is we really didn't read or didn't really hear. Can and regularly is used by police officers to get people convicted, many innocent people as well, because we're so often wrong about what we think we heard. You see, the problem is during the course of the interrogation, if you've been there with them for hours, three, four, five, maybe six hours, relentlessly employing them one more time, they'll try to get you to talk again and again to keep you in there.

They'll pretend to be open-minded. They'll pretend to be undecided, even though they're nothing of the sort. Well, I'm not sure. I'm still kind of confused. Let's take it one more time from the top. And after hours of this process, it's not unnatural and it's not unusual for somebody to slip up and to inadvertently reveal that apparently he or she assumed something that truth be told the cops didn't even tell you and haven't helped you if that detail actually happens to coincide with the facts of the case because then you've just incriminated yourself.

One study described in the book talks about how an examination of 40 different wrongful confessions, confessions given by people who later turned out to be innocent, all of them convicted, almost every single one of them allegedly contained some detail that only the real killer would have known. How in the world does that happen?

It does happen and it will happen to you virtually every chance if you give the police the opportunity. You'll also learn from the book, one of the most important points of all, that your common sense and your intuition are useless to you when you are trying to decide whether you should talk to the police.

And while you must not listen to those countless skeptics and cynics out there online who are constantly trying to dismiss my video and dismiss my book and dismiss my work by suggesting, well, he's kind of exaggerating, the situation's actually a little more nuanced than that, we can't say never because there's this interesting counter example.

These people drive me nuts. So many people out there, intellectual lightweights on the internet, plenty of them, who amuse themselves endlessly, boasting to all the world, oh, look at this imaginative counter example I've come up with. What about this case, professor? What if you're hanging from a cliff and nobody comes and you're about to fall to your death and somebody walks by and it's the police officer, can you talk to him?

You know, these people are the biggest part of the problem. What they don't see, what they don't understand and what they're always trying to constantly suggest is, oh, I can come up with an interesting counter example of that. You don't think I can do that? I mean, any rule that you can think of.

There are lots of wonderful, excellent rules of thumb we teach our children. Don't drive at night over 80 miles an hour with your headlights off. That's a very good rule of thumb with virtually no exceptions. Don't jump into a shark tank when they're eating is a real good bit of advice.

Oh, professor, but what if there's a raging fire right behind you and the shark -- What if driving 80 miles a night is the only way to get away from a raging wildfire that is coming upon the vehicle at the rate of 75 miles from the back? You know what?

Right, that's great. You're so clever. Yes, you're so clever. But I defy you to find an example out there in the real world of anybody who ever got themselves out of a great deal of trouble because they talked to the police and shared information that really couldn't wait a couple of hours.

It couldn't really wait a couple of days. Oh, yeah, we can make up examples like that. What are the odds? Maybe one in a million. I guarantee you, next time you find yourself in a situation where your intuition and your common sense tell you, okay, you're good to go.

This is risk-free. You go ahead and talk. You go for it, girlfriend. Don't listen to that lying voice because that lying voice is ignorant. It doesn't understand what you're up against. The odds that you'll be able to talk your way out of a criminal conviction that you could not have avoided by waiting are one in a billion.

The odds are incomparably greater that you will unwittingly talk yourself into a jail cell perhaps for the rest of your life. Let me prove it to you. Let me give you just a couple of quick examples all from the book. Let me see how reliable your intuition and your common sense are.

Michael Morton, we all know this fella. He served more than 20 years in a Texas prison of a life sentence for a murder that he didn't commit. He was an innocent man, we now know, because of DNA and other evidence. He tried to help the police find out who murdered his wife one day while he was going to work one morning.

Went away to work while he was gone, somebody broke into the house and killed his wife. During the course of their investigation, as is typical, the police quickly came to suspect him because they had no other suspects and they wanted to have the psychological comfort that comes with closing the case.

And they interrogated him for hours, asking all kinds of questions that common sense confirms could not possibly have been calculated to try to lead to the real killer, among other things. They asked him, "Well, let's retrace the last couple of days. Where did you and your wife have dinner the night before?" Well, he told them.

He told them where and when his wife went out for dinner the night before somebody else broke into the house and murdered him. Now, if you were sitting there in his situation, and you were in that position, and you were trying to help the police solve this murder of your wife, ask yourself for a minute, "Do you think there's any way if I tell them the truth, if I know that I'm innocent and I tell them the truth about where and when my wife had dinner the night before, how in the world could that be used to help frame me and potentially convict me of a murder that I know I didn't commit?" Be honest with you.

Ask yourself. Raise your hand if you say, "I honestly don't see how that could be used to help convict me." Yeah, look at all those hands. Good for you. I appreciate your honesty. And the rest of you are lying. What are you, police officers? No, no. The truth is that fact that he did give them the truth, and that information was used to help convict him of her murder.

And as I say, he spent 20 years in prison. How did he do it? No time to tell you, but read the book and you'll find out. Here's another one. Glenn Ford. He was convicted of murder in Louisiana more than 30 years ago. He spent more than 30 years on death row before he was released just last year after DNA and other evidence proved that apparently, whoops, sorry, we got the wrong guy once again.

How was he convicted? Well, he tried to help a police find out who had murdered a shopkeeper in his town. While he was there, they asked him, "Do you mind telling us where and when you were at a certain time?" This guy, because he knew he was innocent, and by the way, we all now know that he was innocent, he made the mistake of thinking, "Well, I guess I might as well tell them," because he thought, "Well, luckily for me, fortunately for me, I've got an airtight alibi.

I've got a couple of friends who can verify that I was with them in another part of town that same day, that same time." How many of you were tempted to say, "Okay, I might as well go ahead and share that information with the police. This is risk-free. This can only help.

This can't possibly hurt." You're wrong. You're all wrong. You see, you can't rely on your intuition. In fact, read the book. You'll see how he gave them accurate and truthful information about where he was at the time of the crime, and they were able to use that information to help convict him of the murder that he did not commit.

Here's another one. A real case. A criminal suspect was told by the police that he had been identified by the victim in a line-up. All he said at that point was, "Then she is mistaken." Four words. "She's mistaken." That's all he said. He denied it. He asserted his innocence.

Can those four words possibly be used to convict him of a crime that he didn't commit? Yeah, it was used, and it can be used. Here's another one. Suppose an innocent man is told by the police that he's a suspect in a crime, but the truth is he wasn't even in that part of the town at night.

He was 50 miles away. He can't prove it. He's got no alibi witnesses who can confirm it, but he tells them truthfully, "No, I wasn't in that vicinity. I was 50 miles away." Could that information, assuming it's true, be used to possibly implicate him in the commission of the crime?

Truth be told, most of you of press would have to say, "I can't see how it could be," which only proves my point. You're wrong. It can be, and people have been convicted because they gave information like that to the police. One last thing I want to share with you about the book.

As I said, the book teaches you the surprising number of ways in which our exercise of the Fifth Amendment has now become a veritable minefield. This was not true until five years ago. It has become extremely perilous. The book explains what you need to say and what you must not say when you are trying to assert your rights.

You will see how easy it is today under the current law where a clumsy or a careless or a casual or an imprecise implication of the Fifth Amendment can, in fact, be used against you in a court of law as if it were an admission of guilt. You can also learn how a careless implication of your Fifth Amendment privilege can also lead you to the prosecution for the separate offense of lying to the police, which is a separate crime.

The last thing you want to do when you're trying to avoid being prosecuted for murder is to end up putting yourself in a position where you can get prosecuted for the crime of lying to the police when actually you shouldn't have said a word at all. And the book will also explain why you must not worry about seeming polite and respectful when you are talking to the police about your legal rights.

I am not suggesting in any way that you should go out of your way to be rude or impolite. That's ridiculous. That's counterproductive, and I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. But the book explains about the countless cases in which real live innocent suspects made the tragic mistake of thinking, "Well, I guess I better take the edge off what I'm saying.

If I sound too unequivocal about what I'm saying, the police might take offense. They might take it as an insult. So I don't want to make it sound like I think I definitely need a lawyer. I'll just be kind of tentative. Maybe I need a lawyer. You think maybe I could have a lawyer?

Is it okay if I get a lawyer?" You want to know what happens when you talk that way to the police? You end up in a prison cell. This book tells you how it happens, and this book tells you how to avoid it. Finally, I mentioned earlier that 50 years ago the Supreme Court said, "You can't use the Fifth Amendment against somebody as evidence of guilt." And that was taken as unquestioned by the Supreme Court and that was 50 short years ago.

But oh, how far we have come. My dear friend Justice Scalia, who was my hero in so many other ways, was the leader until his death on the court of the view that actually only guilty people have any real reason to protect or to care about the Fifth Amendment.

He wrote that the problems caused by the risk of self-incrimination are wholly of the guilty suspect's own making because an innocent person will not find himself in a similar quandary. It's a tragedy that he didn't live to read the book. He would have seen how painfully wrong he was about that.

And Justice Alito, another giant of the court, subscriber to the same madness, just three years ago in the horrible case of Salinas v. Texas, he wrote the opinion for the court, the plurality opinion, in which the court held that the exercise of your Fifth Amendment rights, if you don't do it just the right way, can now be used against you in a court of law as evidence of your guilt.

And in a later case, also argued and won by the U.S. Department of Justice that same year in the U.S. Court of Appeals, they persuaded one circuit court of appeals to hold that your invocation of the Fifth Amendment can also be used against you as evidence of your guilt.

A lot of liberal critics have justifiably lamented this horrible, execrable holding of the court in that case and the fact that the opinion was handed down by the five most conservative justices on the court, the only five Republican appointees on the court. But the truth be told, to give crediting blame where they are respectively due, the dissenting opinion written by the so-called liberals in that case would have been even worse for you and me and for the defense of our liberties.

And to give blame where blame is due, the opinion in Salinas v. Texas was an opinion, although it was written by the most conservative members of the court, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Eric Holder, Barack Obama's Justice Department, filed an amicus brief in the court urging the court to do justice to such a thing to which we as a nation could justly cry out, "Thanks, Obama." What is wrong with the Supreme Court?

The final question that I'll ask and share with you. Well, I can give you the answer. Scalia himself answered that question. Shortly before his death, he wrote, "Truthfully, we federal judges live in a world apart from the vast majority of Americans. After work, we retire to homes in plastic suburbia or to high-rise co-ops with guards at the door.

They're out of touch, and it's not their fault. They don't have any idea what peril the rest of us face in any ordinary routine encounter with the police." Justice Sotomayor, just this year, speaking at Brooklyn Law School, correctly complained that there are no criminal defense lawyers on the court right now.

In the name of diversity, we worry so much about getting people on the court who are a different gender or a different race. And yet we've gotten nine people on the court at the time of Scalia's death. Nine people on the court, none of whom had ever done any significant criminal defense work at all.

None of whom had ever been arrested or charged or prosecuted for the crime. None of whom probably ever met an innocent person who was ever prosecuted or convicted of a crime. We had nine people at the time on the court, almost all of whom had spent virtually all of their entire professional adult lives working for the government.

And most of them, several of them at least, working as U.S. attorneys. That's the problem. We need real diversity on the court. We need somebody who cares passionately about the defense of American constitutional and civil liberties, which of course leads naturally to my last question. I see one's coming in right now from Twitter.

Will you please agree to serve on the Supreme Court? Yes, I will. I am here. I am here today for the first time in American history. This is the first time a candidate has ever announced his candidacy for a position on the U.S. Supreme Court on the Internet. If you know or have any contact with Donald Trump, I want you to send an email to him on Twitter.

I'm President Trump, and we'll use #JusticeDwayne. That's how we'll do this. You let him know that you support my candidacy. If you believe that somebody like me ought to be put on the Supreme Court, you let Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump know that's how you feel. I'm wearing your tie, as you can see.

If you don't know Donald Trump, but you know how to get a hold of Kevin Bacon, let him know, because he, I understand, is not too disconnected from Donald Trump. He can get in touch with virtually anybody, I'm told. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you.

Okay, thank you, James. Our guest commentator today is well qualified to discuss Professor Dwayne's book. He teaches constitutional law at Georgetown and directs the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He also has much experience with the criminal justice system, because before he started his academic career, he worked as a prosecutor with the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Chicago, where he tried many felony cases and worked with police to build those cases.

So he's very familiar with the system. We hosted a book forum for him for his latest title just a few months ago. His new book is titled "Our Republican Constitution, Securing the Liberty and Sovereignty of We the People," published by HarperCollins. Would you please welcome Professor Randy Barnett. Is that a tough act to follow, or what?

Well, let me get out of the way. The first thing and the most important thing that I have to say as my comments to you today, and that is you should buy this book. That's the most important thing I have to say. In fact, when I'm actually promoting my own book, the line I use is, assuming that I'm holding up my book, I say, "You should buy this book." That's the most important thing.

And then if you read the book, that's also good. But the most important thing is that you buy the book. In this case, I have to say there's an exception to that, and that is that what really matters is not buying the book. What really matters in this case is reading the book.

You must not only buy the book, you must read it. This book is different than virtually, I think, any other book that has been promoted from the Hayek Auditorium of the Cato Institute, including my own. Virtually every book that the Cato Institute has a book form about is a "how to make the world a better place" book.

If only the world would read the message in whatever book is being promoted, and a critical mass of Americans were to agree with the message of that book, and then they could somehow act on their political representatives to enact the reforms that are being described in that book, then if all of those things come to pass, the world would be a better place.

So every one of these books is a "world would be a better place" book. This book is not like that. This book really isn't about making the world a better place. This is a book about saving your life and the lives of those who you care about. This is what you would call a self-help book.

Now Cato doesn't normally promote self-help books, but that's what this is. This is a self-help book. You read this book to help yourself and to help anyone who you love, and you tell them to read the book. And here's the reason why you must buy and you must read the book.

You would think, "Well, I don't need to buy the book because I've just heard Professor Duane tell me that all I have to do is not talk to the police." And I'm not a stupid person. I heard him say it. Now I know. Don't talk to the police. What do I need to buy the book for?

Here's the thing. What are self-help books really all about? What's a diet book really all about? It's got like five pages of diet, and then it's got 150 pages of why you should follow the advice of the diet. It's all motivational is what it is. It's trying to get you to actually follow the five pages of diet advice that it's going to give you.

That's what this book does. It's like performance art. You have to read the book to motivate yourself to follow the advice. Why is that? Because when the chips are down and it's time to implement the advice that Professor Duane is giving you, it's going to go against your very being to do so.

You are not going to want to do it. And the only way to motivate yourself to do it is to have internalized the lesson that you must do it, regardless of your instinct telling you not to, because the police are actually going to be encouraging you to go with your instincts.

And the only way you're going to motivate yourself is by having read the book and reading the stories that he's teasing you with. And he doesn't give you the punchline here about each and every one of those cases, the seemingly innocent behavior got this person convicted. So you need to read the book to motivate yourself to follow the advice in the book.

And there's just no substitute for having read the book in order to have that effect. So for that reason, I think I've done the most important part of my job here, is to tell you why you should read the book. But I'm not going to stop there. I first met or I first had in contact with Professor Duane when I came across, and I don't remember how I came across, his YouTube video, his now famous YouTube video, before there was a book.

And I just thought this was amazing. And I sent him a little fan email saying how, wow, I really did enjoy your YouTube video about why you shouldn't talk to the police. And then I said, well, I used to be a prosecutor myself. And I said, I have to tell you, that's the advice that I gave my kids when they were old enough to take my advice.

This is the advice I gave them. And of course, he said in his response, well, this is what everybody in law enforcement tells me. This is what he just told you today. Well, I was one of those people who out of the blue, spontaneously just told him this. But I have to say that in my email to him, I did tell him that I actually gave my kids slightly different advice than the ones that was in the video, YouTube, which is don't talk to the police.

And this is the advice he actually does give in the book itself. He's only sort of hinting at it for today, but I'm going to give away this one little piece of it. And that is what I used to tell my kids is that if they were ever arrested by the police, and it didn't matter if they were guilty or innocent, it really didn't matter whatsoever.

What they were to tell the police was the following. And this is somewhat tailored to them, but you can adjust it to you. I said, look, they tell the police, I would love to talk to you. I would like nothing more than to talk to you. But my father is a lawyer.

And my father has told me that I simply should not talk to you unless I speak to a lawyer, unless I have a lawyer. So I need to speak to a lawyer. I insist on having a lawyer. And that's what you tell the police. You tell them I had like nothing better than to talk to you, except my father's a lawyer and he'd really be mad at me if I didn't assert my right to have legal counsel.

Now, of course, you're not going to be able, unless your father happens to be a lawyer, you're not going to be able to add, of course, you could just say my father's a lawyer. It doesn't really matter if he's not. But you're probably not going to add that part.

But here is the secret. The secret is that you do not assert your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. You assert your right to counsel, your Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Now, this is the advice that Professor Duane does give in the book. And it's correct advice, I think.

And he gives a lot of reasons why if you assert your Fifth Amendment right improperly or incorrectly, you're actually possibly going to get yourself in more trouble, which is much less likely to happen if you assert your right to counsel. But here's another sort of operative on the ground fact about this, which I learned from my experience in the criminal justice system.

And that is if you assert your right to counsel under most rules that govern police, they generally at that point tend to stop questioning you and get a right to counsel, if you adamantly assert your right to counsel. If you only assert your right to remain silent, or you simply remain silent, they will continue to come at you.

They will not stop. They will continue to come at you. Right to counsel will not always make them stop, but it oftentimes makes them stop, under their own rules, under their own internal procedural rules. Now, how did I learn all this? I learned a lot about this. I got the advice that I gave to my kids from my time as a criminal prosecutor.

Tim tells you that I was an assistant state's attorney for the Cook County State's Attorney's Office in Chicago for four years following graduation. And I want to emphasize that to you today, because one is likely to take away from Professor Duane's riveting and entertaining talk, a kind of an anti-law enforcement or anti-police valence, and that's not sort of unusual here at the Cato Institute.

And I just want to emphasize the fact that I became a prosecutor because I support law enforcement. I wanted to be in law enforcement. I wanted to enforce the most important laws that we have in our society, which happen to be laws enforced by states and counties, which is the laws against murder, rape, armed robbery.

I didn't want to be a federal prosecutor enforcing bad and fake laws. I wanted to be a real prosecutor, which I defined as being a county prosecutor. And that's what I got to be, because I wanted to be in law enforcement, and I wanted to work with the police.

And I did. And it was four of the most satisfying years of my life, my four years in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, working with law enforcement, working with police. And I can tell you, I like police going in, and I like police coming out. I have nothing against the police.

I respect the police for what they do. But the most illuminating part, for relevant purposes and even for other purposes, the most illuminating part of my experience as a prosecutor was not the years I spent trying cases in court, either in misdemeanor court or eventually in felony trial court, or I tried jury trials, which were enormously satisfying.

The most informative and in some respects interesting part of my job was the six months I was assigned to a special unit in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office, which is known as the Felony Review Unit. This is something that is generally unknown to the public, that there even is such a thing.

But what happened is, years ago in Chicago, an arrangement was entered into between the Chicago Police Department and the Cook County State's Attorney's Office. These are two different agencies of government. One is the municipality of Chicago, and the other is the Cook County, which is a broader entity. An arrangement was entered into between these two entities, such that the Chicago Police could not file felony charges against anyone unless a state's attorney, an assistant state's attorney, had signed off or approved those charges.

It was actually a great improvement in criminal justice in Chicago, and this is one of the systems. But that required the creation of a 24/7 full-time unit of prosecutors who would be available to go to police stations and evaluate cases on a moment's notice 24/7. So this was an all-day job.

It was a 12-hour night shift or a 12-hour day shift. We had our own offices. We had our own squad cars. And we would respond to police requests to come to a police station. And it was during that six months that one of my jobs in that capacity was to evaluate the cases that the police officers would bring to me, but my other job was to interrogate suspects, which I did quite a lot of.

So I interrogated a lot of suspects, or questioned them. I would say interrogate. I questioned a lot of suspects. I interrogated a lot of suspects. And so I have some feel for what it's like to be on that side of the fence. Now, I admit that when I went to the police station, sometimes at 3 a.m.

in the morning, my incentives were slightly different than those of the police, slightly different, because I was there in my capacity as a prosecutor to evaluate the sufficiency of evidence in the case. I would not have been called unless the police had already determined that they were seeking charges, which means any counts that they thought were unfounded, they would have already dismissed.

They would have already said, "No, we don't have a crime here," or "You didn't do it." By the time I'm called, it's when they already are seeking charges. And so my job is to evaluate a case that has already been somewhat put together, not that much maybe, but somewhat put together.

Now, even under those circumstances -- and my job here is to screen out bad cases so that my fellow prosecutors, who were more senior to me when I was in this job, would not be forced to try terrible cases that really -- where the evidence was not sufficient to win, and my job in the police station was to screen them out.

And at those days -- I don't know what the situation is today, but in those days, we basically had a 60 percent approval rate, which means we disapproved 40 percent of the cases that we look at at any given night. In fact, you had to kind of disapprove a lot just to justify your existence.

So I did disapprove cases, and I did -- but -- so my first job was somewhat different than theirs. My job was there to evaluate and disapprove as well as to approve cases in order to protect my office from having to prosecute cases that had -- where the evidence was questionable.

What was their incentive? The incentive of the police officers are different than mine. They actually have almost no incentive to get convictions. In fact, there's no time in which their incentive structure is premised on convictions. Their incentive is to clear cases. Their incentive is to get a case that's been put on their shelf and get it off.

Now, you can clear a case by saying it's unfounded. It can be done, and it is done. In fact, those are the ones that I never hear about. But once you've decided that the case is well-founded, that is, A, a real crime has been committed, and, B, you think you know who did it, then it's your job to clear the case by getting charges approved by the state's attorney's office.

And truthfully, they could clear a case if I disapprove the charges. But at this point, their job is just to get the case off their plate and move on. In fact, they're not even responsible to help me prosecute the case later on by further investigation. But sometimes I can get them to do it out of the goodness of their heart, but it isn't something -- they don't work for me, and they didn't have to do that, and I would have to do that myself when I was a prosecutor.

So their incentives are different. When I went in to interrogate a suspect or to question a suspect, I basically had two purposes in mind, two objectives there. The first objective was to figure out what the heck happened. Who -- you know, did this person do it? I was actually there in some sense in my own mind to assess guilt or innocence.

And so I was actually genuinely interested in hearing if the person I was questioning was not guilty and they could persuade me that they were not guilty. That would actually matter to me. So I was there for that purpose. But the secondary purpose I was there for is the obvious purpose that Professor Duane has already alluded to.

I was there, if possible, to gain a statement that would incriminate the person if I thought they were guilty. That was my other job. And one of the things that people don't know, which becomes quite clear when you read Professor Duane's book, is that you can incriminate yourself by saying things that are seemingly exculpatory.

That is, you don't simply incriminate yourself by saying, "I did it." You can incriminate yourself by, for example, saying, "I was there." What is saying, "I was --" I mean, "I was there" doesn't mean I did it. "I was there" just means I was there. But "I was there" might actually avoid the difficulty the prosecution might face in proving you were there.

By, for example, the use of very unreliable eyewitness testimony. At the point you finally say, "I was there," all the eyewitness testimony, credibility of eyewitnesses, disappears. It goes away. It's unnecessary because you said you were there. So half the case has now been proven. You're there. Now let's talk about the other half.

So my job as a prosecutor on the -- after I have done the evaluation of whether they're guilty or innocent part, my job was to get statements and get them to commit to a story, whatever the story might be. And next, the other thing, you want them to commit to a story because then they can't make up a better story later.

You want them to commit to a story, whatever the story might be, and then at that point you write it down, you memorialize it, you pass it up to your other -- the other people in the prosecution chain of command, and then they will -- that's the story. That's the only story the defendant now can tell, the one he told in the police station in the middle of the night.

He can't tell a better story once he finds out more about it. So that's the other thing I was there for, to develop inculpating evidence that seemingly is not, and the second thing is to lock a defendant into a story so they can't come up with a better story later.

And all of these things I did. Now I will tell you about one little incident that caused me to change my approach to questioning witnesses, and that is what Professor Duane already told you is that police are not supposed to -- they're not supposed to promise you a benefit, or at least we were instructed.

We were not supposed to promise the defendant a benefit in return for them talking to us or saying anything to us. And the reason why is because if you promise somebody a benefit and then they tell you something, you might not realize -- you might not know why they were telling it to you.

Were they telling it to you because it was true or because you promised them a benefit in return for telling you that thing? And what happened to me one night, and I don't remember the details of the case, but I was interviewing somebody, and I remember that this person ended up inculpating themselves.

I actually think they confessed. And I remember after I heard the confession that, hey, wait a second, I had intimated earlier in that interview that they might get a benefit from telling me that thing. I had not done it on purpose. I knew the rule against it, but I think I inadvertently did it anyway.

And what I realized is once that person told me they did it, I -- sitting there in the police station right in the middle of the night, I couldn't be sure if that was true because of what I'd said. And I resolved from that point forward is that I would never say that again, never, because I wanted to know.

I wanted to prove to my own satisfaction whether the person was guilty. And if I got a confession because after I told them they would get a benefit, I couldn't know if the confession was true or not. And so I resolved not to do that again. But as Professor Duane says in his book, and as he already told you here, the police usually operate under no such scruples.

They have many benefits that they can properly talk to you about and which they will. Okay. So I'm happily done. So I can do this in two minutes. So this is -- what I'm trying to explain to you is that police officers and law enforcement officers such as myself are going to act the way we act and the way I acted, generally speaking, for good motives.

It's because we want to see the guilty punished and we want to see the innocent let go. Police officers, really most police officers, the overwhelming number of police officers, do not want to see innocent people charged with crimes. But they have a job to do. And their job is to clear cases.

And part of their job means to try to figure out what really happened. And they do the best they can. And they develop a theory about what really happened. And what really happened might have involved you falsely. And once they're committed to that theory, they go with it because they don't have a better theory.

Because they've given up looking for better theories. They've settled on the theory they've got. So they're doing what they're doing from good motives. To get a guilty person to confess is not a terrible thing to do. But in the course of doing that, they use techniques that will get innocent people as well.

So in conclusion, let me just analogize this book and why you should buy this book. What does this book serve to you? This is actually a really important book for you. This book is like buying a fire extinguisher for your house. When you buy a fire extinguisher for your house, you never intend to use it.

You hope never to have to use it. But should you ever have to use it, there are two things you want to know about that fire extinguisher. First, where the heck did I put it? And secondly, that it is well charged and that it will work when you need it.

That's what this book is. A fire extinguisher to put out the potential threat to your life or the life of your children from being falsely convicted of a crime that you did not commit. Thanks. >> Okay. Thank you. We're going to now take your questions. I have a couple of requests.

First of all, when I call on you, wait for the microphone to arrive so that everybody can hear your question. Please identify yourself and any affiliation that you might have, and please keep your questions brief so that we can get to as many people as possible. Yes, sir. Here comes the microphone.

>> Professor, one of the tropes on TV crime shows is taking everyone's fingerprints for what they call exclusion purposes. Should you just say no in those circumstances? Do you know what I'm referring to? Okay. >> Sure. Well, if you're under arrest, you have no choice in the matter. >> This is everyone at the scene.

I wouldn't consent to that. I'm a big believer in human liberty, so I have no disrespect whatsoever for the police, but I also know, as I explain in the book, that one of the problems that presently bedevils the American system of criminal justice is the distressing frequency with which expert testimony turns out to be unfounded.

Most of us have heard the famous example about an attorney out in Oregon who apparently was conclusively identified by the FBI as matching the fingerprints on a bomb that was found in Madrid, and we were assured it was an exact match. The guy was actually placed under arrest until later they found another exact match for the same alleged exact match for the same fingerprint for somebody else who apparently was the guy who actually did commit the crime.

So mistakes can be made. If you know that you're innocent and you give the police any kind of information of a forensic nature, hair samples, finger samples, fingerprint samples, voice samples, you're running the risk. You're rolling the dice and taking the terrible chance that some incompetent so-called expert is going to come back and say, "Yes, in my opinion, it's a match." I'd rather not give them the opportunity to make the mistake.

Randy, you wanted to say something? Yeah, and I just want to supplement what I said. There was something very important I forgot to say. After I said that you should assert your right to counsel as opposed to your right to remain silent, one of the reasons for that is--I didn't give the reason--one of the reasons for that is simply that once counsel shows up, through counsel you can provide the police with any information you want to provide the police with through counsel.

And so if you want to assist the investigation, and you sincerely may want to, you can assist the investigation by having counsel tell the police whatever it is that you want to tell them, and the reason why that matters is what counsel tells the police cannot be used against you.

What you tell the police can be used against you, but what counsel tells the police cannot. So you genuinely want to assist the police, but you want to assist the police through counsel, and that way you can both get your exculpatory story on the record, and it cannot be used against you if it turns into one of these horror stories that Professor Duane talks about.

I just neglected to mention that. And you also reminded me of something I wanted to add, because remember he was explaining the advice that he gave to his children, and my father's an attorney, and he said you might want to tailor that to yourself. It is important to remember you don't want to walk out of here with this mistake because it is a federal offense to lie to a federal investigator.

So if you went out of here and said my father's an attorney when he's not an attorney, even though they're investigating this crime, if they wanted to trip you up, they could prosecute you for a federal offense for something little just like that. So tailor that response to the police to your own personal circumstances.

It works for his children. It may not work for you. Okay, more questions. Yes, sir. As a very practical matter, what do you do if you're being questioned and you say I want counsel or I don't want to answer questions, and then you're told, well, if you don't do that, we're going to have to put you under arrest?

I'd call the bluff. I'd call the bluff. I'd say I'd like to go if I can. Am I free to leave? I mean, just because the police say, well, we might have to put you under arrest, doesn't necessarily mean they intend to do it. A police officer isn't necessarily going to arrest you and subject himself to the possibility of a prosecution or a civil suit for false arrest if, in fact, he doesn't have sufficient legal grounds to do so.

And so you can't necessarily believe him when he tells you that's what he thinks he might do or what he plans to do. I'd insist on leaving if I'm free to do so. I'd ask again and again, am I free to go or not, because I'm leaving if I can.

No offense intended, sir. And then I hesitate to say call his bluff, but if he says, no, well, I'm going to arrest you anyway, he's trying to-- odds are very high that he's deceiving you entirely by trying to falsely imply that if you do talk, I might not arrest you, which is not necessarily the case.

There are plenty of reported cases, some of them in this book, where unbeknownst to you, the police officer, before he comes out to meet with you and he'll act like, oh, this is just a low-key kind of a thing, just trying to follow up on a couple of leads, just see if we can give you a chance to clear things up.

Intentionally trying to imply there's no real intensity or excitement surrounding the investigation at this moment, because he knows that's what he has to do to get you to get your guard down and think, OK, I might as well talk. Apparently there's nothing really against me. Unbeknownst to you, he may already have met with a mistaken eyewitness who picked your photo out of a lineup, and he may already have a warrant for your arrest.

And even without a warrant, he may already plan to make an arrest and put you in handcuffs as soon as this meeting ends, no matter how it ends. So don't trust any police officer who implies to you that if you talk, I might not arrest you, and if you don't talk, I might.

That may be true, but just as likely, it's absolutely false. The problem is, as I've said today a hundred different ways, you have no idea what you're up against because the police are not obligated to put their cards on the table. They're allowed by the courts to lie to you with ruthless impunity about everything, what they suspect, what they don't suspect, what evidence they have against you.

They can minimize the charges against you by acting like, well, we know you didn't do it. Or they can exaggerate the evidence against you by saying, we know you did it. We've got five other witnesses who will say that you were there, and we've already got an expert who will confirm that your fingerprints were there.

They can say that, too, even if that's not true. And paradoxically yet, if you tell them one little lie about whether your father's a lawyer, you can go to prison for five years. Better not to talk to these people, really. Let me just add, the reason why that's probably maybe likely not to be true, that they'll arrest you, is because once they place you under arrest, a whole series of procedures and a time clock starts running.

For example, they have a certain amount of time before which they have to bring you before a magistrate. Then right to counsel kicks in. There's a lot of things that happen once the arrest takes place that they are probably not ready to have start happening yet. So the chances of them putting you under arrest on the spot, at least you can at least keep this in mind, is not 100 percent because they have constraints against putting you under arrest when they're not ready to put you under arrest.

Yes, sir. My name is Stephen. You're absolutely wonderful, informative talk. My question is this. Someone is taken or appears at a police station, insists on his or her right to counsel. The police give in, the counsel arrives, and the questioning resumes in front of your counsel. The counsel is in the room?

Yes. Okay. How should someone behave? Would the presence of a counsel make any difference if the person in the police station is answering questions directly from the police? In other words, how should one behave when the counsel arrives and the questioning resumes? If I may go first. There are two aspects of your excellent and very important question that are a little unrealistic, although they're played out every night on television.

We see this on Law & Order just about every episode. It gives us the impression that if you ask for a lawyer, we'll get one in here, and then we will resume the questioning. Actually, both of those assumptions are quite unrealistic. I've been falsely accused by many critics of suggesting that, well, he's trying to drum up business for lawyers because he's advising people to say, "I want to get a lawyer." That's not actually quite correct.

I'm not advising you to get a lawyer. I don't care whether you get a lawyer or not. I'm advising you to tell the police you want a lawyer, which in all likelihood means you won't get one, not right away anyway. The police aren't going to waste their time in the middle of the night making arrangements like they do on TV to get a lawyer to come down there and represent you because they know full well what will happen next.

Any lawyer in town worth his salt will immediately tell the police, "Why did you wake me up? What did you bring me down here for? You know how this works. I'm going to tell you not to talk to my client. I'm going to tell my client not to answer your questions," and they will tell the police this even before they meet with the client because that's what will always happen.

And then regardless--so chances are they won't even bring a lawyer down there. If you make an unequivocal request for a lawyer, that'll be the end of it, and they'll leave you wondering, "Why am I sitting here in the jail cell for hours now? I've asked for a lawyer, and one still is not here, and why are they leaving me alone?" Good news, that's just what you want.

They're leaving you alone. That's all that really matters. But even if a lawyer did come down for some reason, perhaps you actually hired one, and he shows up, the questioning should not resume at that point. The lawyer will give the police an unequivocal instruction, "No, I will not consent to have my client answer any further questions, and in fact, I will not even consent to let my client sit here and participate in the charade of listening in silence to your questions." Because believe it or not, one of the most surprising things in the book that I didn't mention is that you could actually incriminate yourself if you agree to sit there in total silence and say not one word while the police sit there and describe the details of the crime to you.

How could that possibly be the case? This one I will tell you because I wouldn't expect you to be able to guess. Because our judicial system, God bless them, is populated by and large with courts, judges that are almost entirely former prosecutors. That's part of the problem right there.

And our courts have approved the absolute chicanery of allowing police officers to testify that although he never admitted anything exactly, in fact, he never said a word, as I sat there and described the circumstances of the crime, he acted suspiciously nervous. Other courts at the same time will allow police officers to testify that in their expert opinion, he acted suspiciously calm.

So heaven help you, if in the expert psychological evaluation of this police officer in the middle of the night, you come across as a little bit too nervous or just a little too calm, you've got to thread the needle. Talk about skill and charybdis. Are you crazy? Don't even put yourself to the risk of being analyzed this way by a police officer who, with all due respect, is not competent to make that diagnosis about anybody.

When somebody finds out their loved ones are just recently been subjected to a horrible crime, they go into shock. And people in shock react in surprisingly multifarious and unpredictable ways. Look at the videotape. It's online. It's on YouTube. How Paul McCartney reacted when he got the news that John Lennon had been murdered.

He was confronted by strangers out in the street. And he acts so blasé about it that if he didn't have an airtight bail, you'd think for sure that he was actually guilty of something. Because he just says, yeah, Greg, isn't it? Cheers. All right. So acting as if he didn't, you know, he acts creepy, almost suspiciously blasé about the whole thing.

But the reality is he was in shock. The only thing I would add to that or correct is that even a lawyer who's not worth his salt will give you that advice. Yes, sir. Yes, I'm Ronald Wilson. I'm with the federal government. I was a former prosecutor. I have a speak up a little bit more, please.

Yes, I'm a former prosecutor, and I did put a significant number of people in prison for a crime that they did commit. But I was well aware of that the procedures that the police use to try to identify suspects in criminal cases were different from what my objective was, because they were trying to apprehend somebody that they thought had committed a crime.

And so I was quite well aware that sometimes they might use unethical tactics. So I always made sure that I would look at a lot of the evidence, the police reports. I would check the backgrounds of these police officers, and I would thoroughly review these cases just to make sure that we had the right person before I went to court.

And and before not only the the suspect, but also when the police got on the stand to extract the proper evidence and so that the jury could make a sound decision as to the guilt and the innocence of this person and that those who were not guilty that were false accused were exonerated.

Any response to that comment before we move on? I don't doubt that is true. OK, yes, sir. Let me just say one thing. When I talk about the subject with or in the presence of prosecutors and police officers, most of them will routinely assure me some of them really quite emphatically.

Well, let me just tell you right now, we don't put guilty. I'm sorry. We don't put innocent people behind bars. That's not what we do. We don't prosecute innocent people and convict innocent people. And they say very emphatically. Some of them say very sincerely, all of them say very sincerely.

And I don't doubt it. I mean, who could live with themselves if they knew that they were actually, even if only unwittingly and inadvertently working to put innocent people behind bars for life? But somebody's doing it because hundreds of people have been exonerated. They were convicted by somebody, police officers and jurors and prosecutors and state Supreme Court justices who honestly and conscientiously thought they were doing the right thing.

I can say as a bit after four years of being a prosecutor, prosecuting hundreds and hundreds of people that I never knowingly prosecuted an innocent person. But I must have prosecuted innocent people, given the fact that the system can't possibly be perfect. And supposing only one percent of the people charged are innocent, one percent would be at failure rate.

That would be above anything you'd expect from any government process whatsoever, that it's only it's going to be ninety nine percent reliable. Supposing that's true. And I did prosecute hundreds and hundreds of people or I was responsible. I participated in their prosecution. That means if one percent of the people that I prosecuted are innocent, then I prosecuted an innocent person.

The thing is, I didn't know it because all I could go by was the evidence I had before me. And at some point you start somewhat giving I mean, when I was in the police station, I tried to get a sense of whether somebody was guilty or innocent if they would talk to me.

But generally speaking, as a prosecutor, I stopped giving up. I gave up trying to figure out whether somebody was really guilty. I started evaluating evidence the way a judge and jury evaluates evidence. Do I have enough evidence of this? Do I have enough evidence of that? And do I have evidence beyond a reasonable doubt?

And I would conclude that I did. And I would go forward. That was my job. I wasn't out there. I didn't see what happened. I didn't participate in it. And the idea that I would be morally certain about what happened, that happens sometimes, but it doesn't happen all the time.

So all I'm saying is I, I know, I know in my heart of hearts that I didn't knowingly prosecute anyone who was guilty. But I know I must have prosecuted somebody who was innocent just because the odds say so. We know that, Randy. That's why we've scheduled this intervention for you.

We're here to say we forgive you. It's not really about the book. Let me exercise the moderator's prerogative to ask a question. Professor Duane, you mentioned several Supreme Court justices and rulings that are hostile to self-incrimination. The Fifth Amendment, kind of what that's all about. In your research, what about your findings about what your fellow academics are saying about the self-incrimination clause?

To give you one example, from my files, I saw a law review article from a professor who said the historical justifications for the self-incrimination clause are a dead letter in every respect. But I don't know if that's indicative, you know, if that's a popular opinion or it's an outlier.

Do you have any view of where academic opinion is on some of these provisions that you talk about in your book? I do. I do know something about that. I'm not honestly in a position to tell you what the majority view is, so to speak, of all the academics out there who have treated us to their opinion on whether the Fifth Amendment is a good idea or a bad idea, or whether the construction that has been placed upon it by the Supreme Court is, in fact, an accurate interpretation of the intentions of the original Founding Fathers.

I am aware of the fact that a large number, and quite likely a majority, of the most well-known academics in the country are presently taking the view publicly that perhaps the opinions that were handed down, the more liberal opinions handed down by the Supreme Court in the '50s and the '60s, were – the pendulum had swung too far and that they were interpreted in the Fifth Amendment in a way that was a little too protective of individual liberty, or even at least more so than could be justified by the intentions, the original intentions of the Founding Fathers.

But the consensus on that particular point is far from unanimous. It's a lively debate among academics. It's a debate that I'm not terribly interested in, to be candid with you, and this book takes no position either way on all of that. Even if it is perhaps the case that those liberal holdings from the '50s and the '60s were more generous than the Supreme Court really should have been, which is what Alito and Scalia and Thomas and others have recently insinuated in a number of different ways, I'm not the least bit ashamed to suggest that those holdings, whether right or wrong, are still on the books and, at least for the time being, can be a powerful source of protection for innocent people to make sure they don't say things that can be used to convict them for something they didn't do.

I'm not at all apologetic about the fact that I'm doing everything within my power to get that message out to anybody who can listen and hear it. >> Okay. >> Yes, sir. >> Sorry. Go ahead. >> Eyal Moses, No Affiliation. My question is I think I'm like most people in that I don't have a client relationship with any lawyer.

If I got into the position you're talking about, I would know from your book that I should call a lawyer. I would have no idea whom to call, and unfortunately I know from said experience of at least two friends of mine, you can go to prison for a long time because of being screwed by an apathetic or incompetent lawyer.

So my question is what advice would you have for I think most people in that situation who have no idea what lawyer to call? >> It's a very good question because one of my experiences in the criminal justice system was the overwhelming incompetence of so many criminal defense lawyers that I would come in contact with.

There were some incompetent prosecutors, but I thought the incompetence on the defense bar far exceeded any incompetence on our side, and they were in fact hurting people. So the best advice I can ever give anybody if they get into trouble is I can try to refer them to somebody who I think is good, and then I would have to know who that person was before I could make that referral, and you can't know that.

So it's a really difficult question, and lawyers who are bad lawyers are very skillful at portraying good lawyers. They wear nice clothes. They drive nice cars. They can sell themselves as a lawyer even if they can't try their way out of a paper bag, and so that is a real problem.

Really for purposes of this program, and I think Professor Duane already mentioned that, the key here is that you should assert your right to counsel, not that you will then get a counsel because you won't get a counsel, not that they will then hand you a cell phone and say, "Okay, we'll call your lawyer.

Have him come down here and see me." They're not going to do that either. By asserting your right to counsel, that's what will – that's what's most likely to terminate the interrogation, and then you are less likely to be convicted as a result of that, and then the secondary question is what do you do after that?

If you are charged, and we could have – probably have to have a separate program about that. A couple years ago, there was a TV show called Chicago PD, a nationally syndicated law and order kind of TV show, a spinoff from Law & Order, and there was an episode that a number of my students told me about afterwards where a criminal suspect was being questioned by the police down at the station house in a voluntary exchange, and he said to them, "Don't you people get the internet here at the police station?" And they looked at him quizzically and said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "There's a very excellent video on YouTube by a law professor who makes a very convincing case called 'Don't Talk to the Cops.' He cited me as the reason why he was not going to talk to them." I was quite a rush.

In our line of work, it's so unusual to be cited by anybody, be cited by a fictional character on national TV, so you could do that. You could tell the police that you're being – you're represented by that man on YouTube, and if all goes according to plan and it's in the summertime when the Supreme Court is in recess, you can tell the police you want to hire that new justice that President Trump just put on the Supreme Court, that young guy they just added to the Supreme Court, because I will be taking criminal defense cases in the summer when the court is in recess.

Okay. We have time for one more question. Yes, sir. Hi. My name is Robbie Suave. I write for Reason Magazine. I'll be happy to review your book, possibly. I write about school issues mostly. I recently covered something. It was a school – it was a sexting case. This underage girl sent inappropriate pictures to a bunch of the boys in the school.

Of course, the school has a police officer, so then the police officer starts talking to the kids. He says, "Well, can I look at your cell phone? I just want to delete these pictures from your phone." Some weeks later, one of these kids is being charged with sexual exploitation of a minor and could face like 40 years in prison.

What advice would you – but kids don't know that they probably shouldn't talk to the police officer in their school, right? They just think, well, you should talk to your principal. You should talk to your teacher. Is there different incentives or does the rule work differently for kids who are dealing with police officers in schools?

My advice would not be any different, no. In fact, as I've said a couple of times today and as I say again and again in the book, the evidence confirms that people who are most likely to confess or to give incriminating statements that can later be used to lead to a false conviction of something they didn't do are much more likely to be youths and adolescents than to be adults.

They're more easily manipulated, more easily deceived, more likely to be confused about what they're really up against. So it's especially – it's especially critical that young people, that we get this book into their hands. That's why the book was designed by the folks in marketing to be short enough that this new generation will be willing to read the whole thing from cover to cover and why the folks in marketing also designed so that it's just small enough to fit right into a Christmas stocking.

It's perfect for stocking stuffers and it'll be on the shelves in time for holiday gifts. I have something. One of my experiences in the criminal justice system was that the people who didn't talk to the police were people who had been through the penitentiary system, not the jail system but the penitentiary system because by the time they got to the penitentiary, they had years of being told by all the other convicts that you were an idiot to have talked to the police.

So they have years of Professor Duane's training without the benefit of Professor Duane. So they're the people that tended not to talk to us, formerly – former convicts. The people that talked to us a lot were recently turning 18 juveniles. I think the reason I came up with why they ended up talking to us so much more is because many of them had been through the juvenile justice system.

They were experienced criminals as well. Most people tried with crimes have criminal histories. So they had been through the criminal justice system as juveniles. As juveniles, they always talked because the juvenile justice system – there's another thing. It's not mentioned in your book but I just remember. The juvenile justice system is sort of geared towards getting you to talk.

If you don't talk, then the juvenile justice system treats you as a hardened criminal and goes harder on you. But if you do talk to the juvenile case officers and all the rest, then you're going to be OK and then they'll let you go. So they're actually trained as juvenile offenders to talk and then they will be released because they are released.

But the reason why they're being released is primarily because they're juveniles. They think the reason they're being released is because they talked their way out of it. So what happens is immediately they turn 18. They're not juveniles anymore. They're untrained to talk to the police and they get apprehended and they just try to talk their way out of it the way it worked for them in juvenile court and they talk themselves right into it.

So that would be some disparity between juveniles and adults. If I could have one final comment. I just wanted to mention that's exactly right. I wanted to remind a lot of cynics and skeptics who are critical of me and my work and my message and my life's project. That I know that I'm not going to be able to get to the bottom of this.

I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this.

I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this.

I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this.

I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. I'm not going to get to the bottom of this. >> That's a great point to end on. We've run out of time, but Professor Duane is going to be available to sign books, if you are interested in that.

Everybody here is invited to the luncheon that we're going to be having on the second floor. Just go down the hallway to the spiral staircase, and the luncheon will be upstairs. Please thank both of our speakers for a great program. >> Struggling with your electric bill? Get an energy assist from SDG&E and SAFE.

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