

I was listening to a podcast about a Danish murder investigation that included an interview by Danish police of a prisoner suspect in Finland in cooperation with the Finns. They went ahead with the interview without the lawyer present, which seemed normal to the Danes and wrong to their Finnish colleagues. It was one of the reasons why the content of the interview was inadmissible on court. That’s the first thing I thought about regarding a lawyer opt-out.
As a fan of the Nordic Noir genre of crime shows, it’s a great booster for extras. Whenever a person of interest has become an actual suspect, there will be a lawyer present in the show. In 99% of the cases it’s an extra without any lines. So there appears to be a legal requirement to have a lawyer present or the interview cannot or should not proceed.
I think in general it is a hard thing to operate under a system where a lawyer must be present for any interview. There may not be enough lawyers to man every police interview with opt-out rules. They require remuneration as well. This may explain why the rules are so fishy. Case law is caught between not hanstringing police investigations with an opt-out system on the one hand and preventing overreach and abuse by the cops on the other.
Just as a thought experiment: if you required a lawyer being present for any interview at the station, apart from finding a way to pay these poor lawyers you’d also have to come up with a system where enough lawyers are readily available to sit in. Kind of like not all Parisian bakers can go on holiday at the same time. What if there aren’t enough lawyers in your hamlet? Do we maybe need to create a hired function to satisfy the legal requirements? An office in the police station where a lawyer or a rotation of usual suspects of lawyers serve? Wouldn’t this create a proximity where lawyers and cops become too chummy and possibly collude? The interests of the interviewee are best served by cops and lawyers hating each other’s guts but working alongside they’ve become pals. I think there may be an unintended consequence that the course of justice gets more perverted by the opt-out systen than in the current fishy US system.
Everybody is different, I suppose. I’ve seen people blossoming post retirement and falling into a hole. The level of enjoyment you felt for the work you did probably is an indicator of which end of the sliding scale you end up on.
What are you, as in you personally, doing about you feel? Learning to live with it, looking for a hobby, volunteer cause, part-time job? It might be presumptuous of me but I’m reading between the lines that you maybe want to continue feeling useful.