Explain or Clam Up?

Scott Greenfield has a couple of interesting items up over at Simple Justice. First of all, there’s the case of the Jew with suspicious objects on board a plane, as originally reported in the New York Daily News:

A US Airways crew panicked by a Jewish teen’s prayer ritual aborted a flight from LaGuardia Airport on Thursday, landing in Philadelphia amid unfounded fears of a terrorist bomb.

The trouble began when the 17-year-old White Plains youth pulled out two small Scripture-filled boxes used for his morning prayers on the Louisville, Ky.-bound plane, authorities said.

The official story is kind of amusing in a we’ve-seen-all-this-before kind of way:

Officials with the airline, however, said crewmembers “did not receive a clear response” when they talked with the teen, according to a statement issued by Republic Airways, which owns Chautauqua.

Translation: “We didn’t understand his response.”

Scott sums up the problem:

Just because you don’t know what something is doesn’t provide justification to deem it a threat. 

There’s a whole world of truth in that sentence. People with power have always felt a paranoid need to crack down on things they don’t understand. From jazz to rock music, from ferets to pit bulls, from women who wear pants to men who wear droopy pants, unimaginative people have feared them all.

Anyway, when the plane landed, the kid explained what happened to the police and they let him go on his way.

In the other blog post, Scott tells us about a guy who got stopped for a traffic ticket and immediately told the officer he wanted a lawyer. This made the cop suspicious, and she promptly searched the car, finding his mother’s dead body in the trunk.

The problem here is that

the invocation of a constitutional rights cannot serve to give rise to probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, nor can the defendant be questioned after invoking right to counsel.

So the officer discovered the crime during a search that apparently wasn’t legal. Naturally, this will cause problems when the case goes to trial.

What I’m wondering, however, is whether the police and FBI would have let the 17-year-old Jewish kid go if he’d asked for his lawyer when they started questioning him. I mean, it must have seemed obvious to the kid that he could explain the problem and they’d understand. As it turned out, he was right.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean it was a good idea to explain himself. A lot of people are in jail because they explained things to understanding cops.