Criminal Suspects' Rights and Resistance

[This is just the abstract. For more information, contact the author.]

The dominant account of the rights given to suspects arrested by the police tells us that these rights are restrictions on police activity designed to protect suspects against the overwhelming power of the police and to prevent wrongful conviction. Close examination of police investigations, rules and practices shows that rights are integral to the criminal justice system and in practice structure the criminal justice process, bringing into play its error-elimination mechanisms. Rights facilitate the resistance of suspects, a resistance which must take place before knowledge which can become evidence in criminal cases can be produced. Such resistance cannot be mere token resistance, but genuine resistance, and to be genuine, it must stand a chance of success, however remote. Resistance makes possible knowledge which is objective and separate from the power which produces it. Resistance is what is required by police investigators, and rights are provided or on occasion denied in order to enable or provoke it.