Professional Sleep Paralysis Demon

Looks inside:

Here are some more “ambiguous” phrases which courts have found DO NOT invoke your right to a lawyer:

“Maybe I should speak to my lawyer first.”

“I might like a lawyer.”

“I think I should have a lawyer present for this.”

“Could I speak to my lawyer first?”

“How long until my lawyer gets here?”

And perhaps most egregiously – “Get me a lawyer, dawg – ‘cause this is not what’s up.”

Here are the magic phrases which you need to know if you want to invoke your Miranda rights:

1) “Am I free to leave?”

It’s worth asking this even if the answer is obvious. Even if the officer does not let you leave, by forcing them to admit that you are not free to leave, you are creating a record which your attorney can use to prove that you were in custody. Miranda rights only apply if the interrogation is custodial, meaning that police officers will frequently claim that their suspects were “not in custody” to get around their Miranda rights.

2) “I am invoking my right to remain silent.”

Simply staying silent will not invoke your right to remain silent. As absurd as this is, you must explicitly say that you are invoking your right to remain silent in order to invoke that right.

3) “I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

As stated above, you must be not only clear and unambiguous, but clear and legally unambiguous. Don’t get cute. Don’t get sassy. And on the flip side, don’t get intimidated and use verbal ticks to minimize your request. Say the line with those words exactly – say it clearly, and say it once, and then say nothing else.

Because even after you’ve done all this, the police can still try to get you to talk. They’re not supposed to interrogate you, but they’re allowed to make casual conversation, and if that conversation just happens to circle back around to the thing they wanted to question you about, well, that’s really your fault for talking after you said you wouldn’t, isn’t it? Can’t possibly fault the poor officers when you initiated – if you really wanted to have your rights respected, you wouldn’t have talked to them in the first place.

The police know this, and they will mercilessly exploit this loophole. So, once you’ve successfully invoked your Miranda rights, any and all conversation you have with police officers will put those rights back into jeopardy. 

Putting it all together:

Ask: “Am I free to leave?”

If they say no, say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent and I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

And then shut up and do not say a single thing to them for any reason whatsoever until you have actually spoken to an attorney. Yes, even if it takes hours. Yes, even if they start talking to you about something else.

Finally, a very important disclaimer:

Every single cop lies. Every single cop lies and manipulates and twists the situation around to get a confession. Even when they know that the person is innocent, even when they know that what they have isn’t enough to convict someone, even when they know that that confession has been made under duress or manipulation. All they care about is getting anything to put someone behind bars.

But the argument that it’s poor representation because it reinforces a negative stereotype about trans women confuses me, since all of Jax's actions pre-Abstraction take place before any sort of significant transition, and because of his repression, not her transness.

A) aren’t transgender and really shouldn’t be speaking on our behalf about what is and isn’t “bad rep”

B) are transgender but were privileged enough to not have to deal with the level of shame, fear, and repression depicted in Jax’s arc

I grew up in a religious, wealthy, conservative area where people cared a lot about keeping up appearances and having a “weird kid” could ruin your reputation. Me and about 6 of my friends at the time were closeted (binary trans and nonbinary) and istg we went through this exact scenario: we were forced to stay in the closet and keep our defenses up, and being repressed for that long with that level of stigma piled on from all directions genuinely does fuck up your mind. It puts you on edge. It makes you start distrusting yourself and your own identity. It makes you live a double life out of desperation to the point where you’re scared that any given person existing in your space will clock you and use that to make your life a living hell. That shit can destroy you, and it almost destroyed me.

I wouldn’t wish my past experiences on anybody and I’m genuinely happy that there are people out there who live in safe enough environments where they don’t have to worry about these things, but Jax’s character arc as it’s written is not a happy one. It was written to depict a very real struggle that a lot of us have lived through and how easily that level of trauma can cut a life short, and I’m honestly unsettled by the amount of people who are seemingly crying “bad-faith representation” over being confronted with a view of the trans experience that isn’t happy, polished, or sanitized.

We have got to stop framing our oppression in ways that promote the idea that other people cannot relate to our struggles. Not only does it isolate comrades in the struggle, it actively diminishes recognition of other struggles--often including those even more horrific than what we are at risk of. And this happens especially between Gay and Black struggles.

"when have straight people ever had to check what states were safe for them?" Sundown towns are still a thing. Starlight tours. What states have abortion access? What states have open carry? What states have stand your ground? What states have 3-strike rules? Women, people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and more have had to be abundantly cautious where they travel to. Straight trans people have much more travel risk right now than gay cis people.

It's a new iteration of the same tired question: "imagine if straight people weren't allowed to marry" interracial marriage in the US is younger than my parents. We disgrace people of color by forgetting their history and contemporary struggles, and we abandon queer people of color, Black queer people, by segmenting their overlapping fights.