By H. Michael Steinberg, A Colorado Criminal Defense Lawyer – Practicing Colorado Criminal Law in the courts of Colorado for over 40 years.
People delete texts for normal reasons all the time. Clearing space. Cleaning up a messy thread. Panic deleting after an argument. Switching phones. Or just… not wanting old stuff sitting there forever.
Introduction
IntroductionThe call usually comes without warning. A detective leaves a voicemail asking you to “come in and clear a few things up.” Officers knock at 6 a.m. with a search warrant. A relative mentions that police have been asking questions about you. Or you simply learn — from a text, a subpoena, an employer, a former friend — that someone has made an accusation.
In that moment, most people do what feels natural: they try to fix it. They explain, apologize, reach out, delete, post, or wait and hope. Nearly every one of those instincts is understandable. Many of them are also the precise moves that turn a defensible situation into a difficult one — and sometimes into a second, separate crime.
By H. Michael Steinberg, A Colorado Criminal Defense Lawyer
In part 1 of this article, we did a kind of surface review of this difficult and complex area.
“I have nothing to hide” is the most natural sentence in the world — and one of the riskiest.
By H. Michael Steinberg, A Colorado Criminal Defense Lawyer – Practicing Colorado Criminal Law in the courts of Colorado for over 40 years.
IntroductionShort answer: yes — even the parts that make you look bad, especially the parts that make you look bad.
Introduction
IntroductionSilence is protected only when it’s properly invoked as a Fifth Amendment right; pre-arrest, pre-Miranda silence can, in some circumstances, be used as evidence, while post-arrest, post-Miranda silence generally cannot.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings in Berghuis v. Thompkins and Salinas v. Texas established that silence does not automatically trigger Fifth Amendment protection — a suspect must affirmatively and clearly invoke the right to remain silent for it to count.
By H. Michael Steinberg, A Colorado Criminal Defense Lawyer – Practicing Colorado Criminal Law in the courts of Colorado for over 40 years.
IntroductionUnder Crim. P. 41.1(c), a court may issue an order for police officers to collect non-testimonial identification evidence from a suspect if the officers have “probable cause to believe that an offense has been committed; . . . reasonable grounds, not amounting to probable cause to arrest, to suspect that the person named . . . in the affidavit committed the offense;” and believe the testimonial identification evidence will materially aid “in determining whether the person named in the affidavit committed the offense.”
Introduction:
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