Drop the Pen! What Every Writer Should Know About Real Police Work: You Have the Right to Learn About the Miranda Warning

By DL Williams

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“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law…or in a good tabloid story.” Leslie Nielsen in the 1988 police comedy, The Naked Gun.

Once upon a time there was a fellow by the name of Ernesto Miranda who did not play well with others. He spent the bulk of his life in jails and prison, and that revolving cell door pattern would continue for the rest of his life until he died from stab wounds incurred during a 1976 bar fight. His life was one of rage and pain and waste. 

But he changed criminal investigations forever. 

In 1963 Miranda kidnapped and sexually assaulted an eighteen-year-old woman in Phoenix, Arizona. The woman Miranda attacked was able to provide a solid description, as well as the make, model, color, and partial license plate of his pickup. Phoenix P.D. officers picked him up, whereupon detectives put him in a lineup and interrogated him until he confessed. Miranda was found guilty at trial, which is when the story takes a turn. 

The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, where the conviction was thrown out stemming from the fact the detectives had not adequately ensured Mr. Miranda understood his Fifth Amendment right to be silent while being questioned as a criminal suspect, as well as his Sixth Amendment right to have an attorney present during interrogation by the police. 

To be clear, the Phoenix officers did some solid police work, but the times, they were a-changin’, and so was legal precedent. Few police professionals had thought about reminding suspects they had constitutional rights, and the very idea of giving people accused of violent crimes such a reminder would have been about as popular as a cop walking into a squad room wearing a duty belt under a tutu.

The Miranda vs. Arizona ruling changed everything when it came to police interrogations. Nowadays, as I’m sure you’ve surmised from police procedurals in films and novels, officers dutifully issue the warning at the point of arrest as a matter of routine and departmental policy. 

I wonder how many times we’ve heard fictional cops recite the Miranda warning on television. I bet you could list the whole thing from memory the next time you make a citizen’s arrest.  I should point out a couple of things before we continue: 

1. It’s best to not have your cop character recite Miranda from memory. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

2. Most of the time, it’s best to avoid making a citizen’s arrest in real life. It’s dangerous, it can get you sued, and you’ll end up on someone’s social media feed looking like a big old citizens’-arrest-making doofus. 

It's conceivable you’re writing about a police detective or patrol officer who will wind up reading the warning. You have some wiggle room depending on how detailed you want to be with the project, so let’s examine a few ways Miranda can or should be applied so that you can make informed decisions as you delve deeper into your work in progress. 

The Miranda Warning must be read to a criminal suspect if that person is not allowed to leave and the questions to be posed by the police investigators could be used against the suspect at trial. Both elements must be in place for the warning to be required. So, your protagonist might make an arrest but have no plans to ask follow-up questions. In this case, your fictional cop might not give the Miranda Warning at all. 

An example is the arrest of a man for an outstanding warrant for failure to pay child support. The warrant was discovered when a patrol officer pulled him over for speeding through a school zone, and a check of the driver’s license through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) resulted in a warrant “hit.” The officer in this scenario has no involvement in the child support case, so there is no reason to ask questions about it. Thus, the officer would most likely serve the warrant but not ask the suspect anything about it. 

An investigator may also opt against giving the warning if she wants to ask potentially incriminating questions but has no plans to make an immediate arrest. In this instance, she could ask questions as long as she lets the suspect leave when questioning is done. This is a legally sound strategy, albeit a risky one. Conceivably, the suspect could confess to the beheading of his ex-wife, and the detective would still have to let him go. That’s not to say she couldn’t go get an arrest warrant and pick him up later, but an axe murderer is walking the streets in the meantime. 

I used this technique twice in my career. In one of those instances, I was out on a case and working alone. I suspected a young man of participating in a gang-related shooting the day before. I’d learned from an informant that the man had helped the shooting suspect by picking up the spent bullet casings at the crime scene. He was in hot water for tampering with evidence, but he was also a witness to the actual shooting. I needed him to cooperate, and I had to make some quick decisions to make that happen. 

The young man was stronger and faster than me. Arresting him alone could have gotten someone hurt (probably me, if we’re being honest), and it also would have shut down any chance of getting him to talk to me. Asking him questions about the part he played in the aftermath of the shooting would incriminate him, but I was certain giving him his rights in that moment would have spooked him. Thus, I asked about the shooting and suggested (honestly) that his cooperation could help him if and when he was arrested for the evidence tampering charge. 

Using this tactic requires officers to be fully transparent about their intentions. Suspects can’t read minds, and many believe they are not free to go at any time. It is incumbent upon the officer to make it clear throughout the interview that the person being questioned is not in custody. Thus, an investigating officer would literally say, “Listen, you’re free to go, but I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time.” 

This also means the officer’s body language must match what she said. She can’t stand between the person being questioned and the exit door so there is no confusion about how and where the person can leave. Your fictional detective will likely keep the conversational tone light, and it is always best practice to record the conversation, so judges and juries know she was upfront with her intentions and upheld her commitment. 

I mentioned earlier that it is a good idea for cops to refrain from giving the warning from memory. It looks slick on film, but it can be awkward in real life if you stumble over the wording or leave out one of the required elements entirely. This can happen when adrenaline is up, so every detective I’ve ever known carried a laminated copy of the warning in their badge wallet. 

This can also be a crucial element at trial. A defense attorney might ask the testifying officer if he gave the warning from memory. An inexperienced officer might answer, “I did it from memory,” with a smug look on his face, thinking this is some sort of IQ test he just passed. 

Unfortunately, his day just got a little longer, because the next question out of the attorney’s mouth will be, “Would you please recite that for us now…from memory.” 

I don’t care how tough you are or how comfortable you feel talking in front of a judge, jury, the accused, the lawyers for the accused, and an audience watching the trial. You are going to mess up when called upon to recite under such duress, at which point the attorney will make hay out of the suspicion you didn’t correctly provide the suspect his rights. 

Conversely, if you testify you read the Miranda Warning off a laminated card, the attorney is likely to drop the entire line of questioning. It’s safer and more professional, and it is simply a better way to get the job done. 

I have one more thought on the Miranda Warning. Yes, it can be a bit of a hassle, and it might be the catalyst for the suspect to clam up and ask for a lawyer. It is also true that hardened criminals who have been in and out of prison most of their life know the warning as well as you or I. However, I came to a conclusion some years back that the warning is also a reminder to good police officers that the people we suspect of horrible crimes are still endowed with certain rights. We’re the good guys, and remembering to treat even the worst offenders as suspects instead of as guilty by our own opinions is how we stay right with the law and with the ethics we swore to uphold. Onward!

The Myth of the Untraceable Poison

By DP Lyle

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One of the most common questions I get from writers is: Is there a poison that can’t be found in a corpse? The answer is No. And Yes.

Much depends on the state of the corpse when it is found. If severely decayed or completely skeletonized, the ME and the forensic toxicologist have their hands tied. Mostly. There are some toxins, such as the heavy metals (Mercury, Lead, and Arsenic are common ones), that can be found in bones and hair. But most toxins can’t be found in corpses that are severely decayed or simply bones.

In a more or less intact body, your villain can still get away with the murder by poison. That is, until your clever sleuth figures out that something is amiss and solves the crime.

The first thing your murderer must consider is how to make the poisoning look like something else. An example would be an elderly person with heart and lung disease who dies in his sleep. In this case, the person's private physician would sign the death certificate as a natural cardiac death and, almost always, the ME will accept it. Why? Because there is an old adage in medicine that says: Common things occur commonly. Most people who die in this situation do indeed die from natural causes, so searching for something more sinister would be neither logical nor practical. If the ME accepted the private physician’s cause of death, no autopsy would be done, and no toxicological examinations would be undertaken. An overdose of Morphine or digitalis or arsenic or anything else would go undetected. 

Unless someone asked questions. Maybe a high-dollar inheritance or insurance policy is in play. If an inheritance, one family member could suspect another and ask questions. In the case of a large insurance policy, the insurance company would look under every stone before paying off the policy. Or your sleuth could have some reason to suspect that things are not as they seem. In any of these situations, the ME might be moved to open a file and investigate. 

But if your killer is clever, he might be able to keep the ME completely out of the picture or at least give him an easy answer for the cause of death. If no murder is suspected, he'll take the path of least resistance, which is also the cheapest route. Remember, he must live with and justify his budget annually. If he is wasteful, he'll be looking for a job. So, give him a cheap and easy out. Your sleuth will then have to battle the ME to get the case re-opened.

The second thing a clever poisoner can do is to use a poison that is not readily detectable and will slip through most drug screens. Toxicology testing follows a two-tiered approach. Screening Tests, which are easier, faster, and cheaper, are used to identify common classes of drugs such as narcotics or amphetamines. This only tells the ME and toxicologist that some type of narcotic or amphetamine is present, but not which one. Determining which one requires more sophisticated, time-consuming, and expensive Confirmatory Testing. And if the screening tests are normal, no further testing is warranted and the ME would not spend the time and money to go further down that road. 

Drug screens typically test for alcohol, narcotics, sedatives, marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and aspirin. Some screen for a few other classes. Once a member of a class is identified, then confirmatory testing will determine exactly which member of the class is present and in what amount. For example, if narcotic is found in the screen, further testing might show that the actual narcotic present is morphine. Or an amphetamine might be further analyzed, and this might show that methamphetamine is the culprit. 

Your poisoner could use a poison that would not be found in the typical screen. Things such as arsenic, selenium, and most plants (oleander, deadly nightshade, etc.) do not show up on the typical tox screen, and when the screen comes back negative, the ME might not go further. Why would he spend the time and money without a good reason? This is where your sleuth steps in to shake things up.

But, if a poison is suspected and if the funds and interest to pursue it are present, anything can be found in an intact corpse. Using gas chromatography in conjunction with either mass spectrometry (GS/MS) or infrared spectroscopy (GC/IR) will give a chemical fingerprint for any molecule. And since each molecule has its own structure and thus its own fingerprint, every compound can be distinguished from every other one.

To write a good mystery that will keep the reader guessing to the end, you must plot the nearly perfect murder. This way when your sleuth cracks the case, he or she will be a true hero. If poisoning is your killer’s chosen weapon, then use the above principles to make your plot as clever and convoluted as possible. Have your killer mask the death as natural or use some poison that is not readily detectable in screening tests and then your sleuth must be very clever to solve the case.

There are several sources for you to search out poisons and to discover how they act and how they are identified. Google, of course, and try plugging into your state poison control center. My books, Forensic For Dummies, Murder and Mayhem, and Forensics and Fiction cover a number of poisons. I also recommend Howdunnit: Book of Poisons by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon from Writers’ Digest Books. It is a great resource for poisons of all types.

Partners in Crime (Writing)

By Tilia Klebenov Jacobs

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When I tell fellow authors I have a writing partner, I generally get one of two responses. The most common is a shock, rather as if I had casually mentioned that I prefer to eat bananas with the peel on. The second, though less frequent, is a cry of recognition: “Me too!” they exclaim. “Of course, you need to know each other really well first, and it’s essential that you work the same way. Couldn’t have a plotter working with a pantser, haha!”

Well, not necessarily. Allow me to lift the veil.

My partner Norman and I knew each other slightly in college, where he was editor of the campus newspaper that I wrote one article for. After college, I published a few novels, and he published a pile of short works in publications that turned me down. A few decades later we were nominally in touch on Facebook, but never spoke or met.

Then Covid hit. Writing at home with everyone under the same roof 24/7 stunk. I wasn’t good at it. While I was trying—really trying!—to write a story for a teacher friend of mine to share with her students, Norman contacted me on Facebook Messenger to ask if I knew of any writers’ groups for short stories. I didn’t, but after we’d texted for a bit about fiction, families, and more, I asked if he wanted to write together. He did. We hammered out the story for my friend and her students, and then got cracking on a novel. During that deeply unnerving time, it was marvelous to have someone to be accountable for: like having a gym buddy, but for words. 

In our experience—your mileage may vary—partners don’t necessarily need to know each other well, because we certainly didn’t. Nor do you need to have identical work styles: Norman is a pantser, and I am a blackbelt plotter (He’s adjusting nicely.) Instead, our partnership was a process of getting to know each other while adapting to one another’s approaches, and accepting that our skill sets didn’t need to be identical as long as they were complementary.

That being said, writing partners need to have a few things in common. The first, not surprisingly, is a work ethic. We take our projects seriously, showing up for meetings and producing whatever we jointly agree upon. 

The second is a sense of humor. Each of us had our characters do and say things that the other found hilarious. If you don’t share a funny bone, you see the world differently.

Finally, partners need a mutual vision of the project, including an agreed-upon-conclusion. If you’re working on a joint project but one of you is writing a noir detective story and the other has embarked upon a musical rom-com set in San Juan Capistrano on the day the swallows return, the mission is doomed.

(In the not-mandatory-but-useful category, we found it’s very helpful to have families that are at about the same stage. I can’t tell you how many times I texted Norman to say, “I’ll be late for the meeting—turns out I have kids.”)

Above all else, listen to what the story has to say to you. Our novel took us in some unexpected directions, but we respected it and each other enough to see where it led us. Sometimes the art knows more than the artist. Add a steady drip of mutual respect, and you can garner results that outstrip anything either of you could have pulled off alone. 

Sometimes the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Till Klebenov Jacobs is a crime writer based in New England. Her latest book is Stealing Time.

Ten Medical and Forensic Mistakes Writers Should Never Make

By D. P. Lyle, MD

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Writers make mistakes. An anachronism here, a blunder in logic there, departures from common sense everywhere, and of course the all-too-common break from real world possibilities that plagues even the most well-written story. It’s part of the process. Sitting alone, bouncing clever ideas off your computer screen offers little feedback. But readers notice such breaches. They shake their heads, close the book, snuff out the light, and go to sleep. Not the ringing endorsement you wished for. Here are some of the most common medical and forensic mistakes writers make. Mistakes you want to avoid.

The Quick Death: Death rarely arrives instantly. Sure, it can occur with heart attacks, strokes, and extremely abnormal heart rhythms, but trauma, such as gunshot wounds and blows to the head, the staples of crime fiction, rarely cause sudden death. Yet, how often has a single shot felled a villain? Bang, and he drops dead. In order for that to occur, the bullet would need to severely damage the brain, the heart, or the cervical (neck) portion of the spinal cord. A shot to the chest or abdomen leads to screaming and moaning and bleeding and expletives, but death comes from bleeding and that takes time. How long? It depends on what’s damaged. If a major artery is opened, the bleeding is brisk and death can follow in five minutes, even less. If the bullet or knife blade only strikes tissues and organs, the bleeding is slower and death can take many minutes, or hours, or not at all.

The Pretty Death: I call this the “Hollywood Death.” Calm, peaceful, and not a hair out of place. Blood? Almost never. Except in slasher movies of course and here massive bleeding is the norm. More often, the deceased is nicely dressed, lying in bed, make-up perfect, and with a slight flutter of the eyelids if you look closely. Real dead people are not pretty. I don’t care what they looked like during life, in death they are pale, waxy, and gray. Their eyes do not flutter, and they do not look relaxed and peaceful. They look dead.

The Bleeding Corpse: Your detective arrives at the scene a half hour after the murder. Blood oozes from the corpse’s mouth, from the stab wound in his chest, or from the vampire fang marks on his neck. Houston, we have a problem. You see, dead folks don’t bleed. When you die, your heart stops, and the blood no longer circulates. Rather, it stagnates and clots and stagnant and clotted blood does not move. It does not drip or gush or ooze or gurgle or flow or trickle from the body. It lies there, separates into a dark red clot with a halo of straw-colored serum, and then dries to a brownish stain.

The Accurate Time of Death: Determining the time of death is neither easy nor very accurate. It’s always a best guess and is always stated as a range rather than an exact time. Yet, how many times have you seen the medical examiner (ME) confidently announce that the victim died at “8:30 last night”? I always wondered exactly how he made this determination. Was it rigor mortis, body temperature, or lividity? Was it the presence or absence of certain bugs? The truth is that none of these is accurate. The decline in body temperature, the appearance of rigor, the development of lividity, and the appearance of flies and bugs are affected by many variables so are mostly unpredictable. The touted guidelines for each of these are like stop signs in Italy--merely suggestions. In real-life, the ME would say that death likely occurred “between 8 p.m. and midnight.” But that might make him appear wishy-washy, and Hollywood and writers like their heroes to be smart. Smarter than they could possibly be. Stick with a range, and you’ll be more realistic.

The One-punch Knockout: You’ve seen this a million times. One character socks another character in the jaw. He goes down like a sack of potatoes and is apparently written out of the story since we never hear from him again. Really? Think about a boxing match. Two guys that are trained to inflict damage and they have trouble knocking each other out. And when they do, the one on his back is up in a couple of minutes, claiming the other guy caught him with a lucky punch. Listen to me. Only James Bond can knock someone out with a single blow, and maybe Mike Tyson, but your car-salesman-turned-amateur-sleuth cannot.

Another common scenario is when a character is hit in the head, placed in the trunk of car, driven 50 miles, tied to a post or a bed or whatever, and then a bucket of water is thrown in his face to revive him. He sputters and is suddenly wake and alert. Not going to happen. If someone is knocked unconscious and doesn’t come around in a few minutes, something very bad is going on. Like a brain bruise (cerebral contusion) or bleeding into or around the brain (subdural hematoma). These require a hospital and a neurosurgeon, not a bucket of water.

The Disappearing Black Eye: If your character suffers a black eye in Chapter 3, she will have it for two weeks, which depending on the time frame of your story just might take you to the end of the book. She will not be “normal” in two days. A black eye is a contusion (bruise) and is caused by blood leaking from tiny blood vessels that are injured by the blow. It takes the body about two weeks to clear all that blood from the tissues. It will darken over two days, fade over four or five, turn greenish, brownish, and a sickly yellow before it disappears. On a good note, by about day seven, she might be able to hide it with make-up.

The Quick Healing: Do you know why boxers wear gloves? To protect their hands and faces. Back in the bare-knuckle days, broken hands and cut and bloody faces were the norm. Gloves made the sport more civilized. So, if your character gets in a fist fight both he and his opponent will suffer cuts and bruises and broken teeth. He will not walk away unscathed. His cuts will need stitches, his bruises ice, and a trip to the dentist is likely. Each of these will take a couple of weeks to heal.

If your character falls down the stairs and injures his back, he will not be able to run from or chase the bad guy or make love to his new lover the next day. Give the guy a few days to heal and make him limp and complain in the interim. If he breaks an arm, he’ll need four weeks minimum.

If he’s stabbed or shot and, as so many protagonists do, sneaks out of the hospital the next day to continue his pursuit of the bad guys, all will not be forgiven. He will have pain that will limit his ability to run and jump and fight and do all those hero things. The chances that his wound could then become infected are real and would greatly complicate his situation and might even kill him.

If his car goes over an embankment and tumbles into a ravine, he will not simply crawl out and walk away. At best he’ll be banged and bruised and at worst will have broken bones and injured internal organs. 

The Instant Athlete: Your PI drinks too much, smokes two packs a day, and eats fast food on a regular basis. After all, stake outs are boring. His belly flaps over his belt and he gets short of breath climbing a single flight of stairs. He will not be able to chase the villain for ten blocks. Two on a good day. 

If you create a scene where your character must run down a bad guy, make him capable of such a pursuit. Remember “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) in Marathon Man? He was student, slight of build, not athletic appearing in the least, yet he had to run for his life as Dr. Christian Szell (Sir Laurence Olivier) and his Nazi thugs chased him endlessly. But he was capable. Earlier in the film we learned that he was distance runner and ran around the reservoir in Central Park everyday. He could run for his life.

The Untraceable Poison: Of all the questions I receive from writers this is number one. Seems that all crime writers want an untraceable poison. Sorry, no such thing. True it might not be found or maybe not even searched for, but if it is looked for and if the ME has good blood or tissue samples, he will find it. With fancy equipment like Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GS-MS) virtually any chemical can be identified. This combination gives a “chemical fingerprint” of the compound in question. 

The most common drugs involved in overdose deaths are alcohol, narcotics, amphetamines, cocaine, and various tranquilizers and sedatives. The main reason is that these are readily available either on the street or in the medicine cabinet. Each of these is revealed by a simple and cheap drug screen. So, if your killer employs one of these, the ME will know it in a couple of hours.

But what if the toxin is more exotic? Maybe cyanide or thallium or the toxin of a blue-ringed octopus? This is trickier. These don’t show up on routine drug screens and must be tested for with time-consuming and expensive protocols. Maybe the ME doesn’t have the time, interest, or budget to do a full toxicological examination. Maybe he simply attributes the death to some natural cause and saves the county a ton of money. Happens all the time and it can happen in your story. But, if he pulls out all the stops, he will find the drug.

The Instant Lab Result: The world is not like CSI. Not even close. Those CSI folks get results in a New York minute. Sometimes faster. They crack computers, perform autopsies, complete esoteric toxicological testing, and create DNA profiles before the first commercial break. In the real world such testing typically takes days, even weeks. Sure a tox screen can be done in a couple of hours but sophisticated confirmatory testing takes time. DNA profiling can be done in a few hours, but before the ME reports his results he will often obtain confirmation from another lab, particularly in high-profile cases, including those that crime writers dream up. Give your ME a realistic timeframe to do his work. Your readers will notice if you don’t.

The devil is always in the details. Get these details right and your story will be much stronger.

D. P. Lyle

Outliers Writing University: https://www.outlierswritinguniversity.com