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Understanding Virginia Police Procedures: Overview

Crime shows have regained their popularity with the public. There are more than ever movies, television programming, and even video games featuring the “cops and robbers” and “good guys and bad guys” themes. I personally find most entertaining the Law and Order program and its offshoots (Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; Law and Order: Criminal Intent) because the writers incorporate into their scripts attention-riveting adaptations of recent real events.

These programs, in addition to providing relaxing diversion from a rough day at the office or around the house, serve an educational purpose of sorts, albeit in the most basic sense. After all, how many television shows or movies do you have to see before it becomes evident that when the police arrest someone, they have to say, “You have the right to remain silent, you have the right to …” However, can one really learn the basics of police procedures and the limits of their lawful conduct by watching movies and television shows? Yeah, about as much as foregoing three years of law school and passing the bar exam because you have watched every Perry Mason and Matlock episode four times.

It is a more complex world we live in than depicted on television or moving pictures. Criminal trials are not held within a couple of weeks after an arrest is made, and lawyers do not argue motions before judges during a walk in the hallway of the courthouse. In the real world, the real people go to prison. In the real world, real people are executed. In the real world, not all federal agents, state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, detectives and policemen are good guys. In the real world, not all prosecutors are “white knights” like the Jack McCoy character in Law and Order.

Criminal law and procedure has evolved over the two centuries since the Constitution was adopted just as the country has evolved during that time. There are criminal laws on the books now that our Virginia forebears George Mason, James Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall, and the other great minds of our country’s early founding never envisioned.

As society has moved forward, its laws have changed. More laws have been enacted than existed in the era when our country was founded. As lawyers became more plentiful and skillful in defending their clients at the dock, it fell to the judges to curb the government’s abuses of constitutional rights against self-incrimination, illegal searches, and other tactics that police used to build “solid cases” against people they arrest.

Our jails and prisons are filled with a goodly percentage of people who really are innocent of the crimes they were convicted for; and sadly, the cemeteries, crematoria and medical schools in this great country have housed scores of innocents who were hanged, electrocuted, firing-squad shot, or lethally-injected because of bad luck or human error. As law-abiding citizens – which we all are presumed to be until found otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt – few of us understand what a disadvantage we are at when dealing with situations where there is the potential of being charged with and possibly convicted of a crime.

The reality is that no matter how innocent one may be, or how skillfully in the courtroom his lawyer performs, many times the difference between the sole dual alternatives one faces in a criminal trial – freedom, or time behind bars – hangs by the tiniest of threads woven at the outset: in the choices made in the span of time that he is first approached by the police before he is charged. And that is the point of this series: to provide a broad overview of rights you have in police encounters, and understanding police procedures.

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