If you’re arrested, the smartest course of action is to not make any statements at all and ask to speak to a lawyer. When you ask to speak to a lawyer, your statement can’t later be used against you in court. If you were to have a jury trial, the jury would never find out that you asked for a lawyer. The judge wouldn’t hold it against you.
A lawyer can help protect you from unfair police investigation techniques that would be used against you if you decided to make a statement. For example, in all fairness, officers should record statements made by the suspect being arrested. But, they don’t always do it, or sometimes they record it and later they say they lost it, and that puts you in a position where not only what you said could be used against you, but what you said can be manipulated, and colored, and misremembered by the officer and then used against you.
If you have a lawyer who helps make a statement, that lawyer is going to make sure that everything is recorded and that the statement that you make to the officers can’t be manipulated later.
