If you don respond to a police officers questions, could that be considered obstruction of justice?
It depends on the situation. You are allowed not to answer questions that would cause you to incriminate yourself, IE, ‘did you kill that man’, and your refusal to answer cannot be taken as evidence that you have or have not committed the crime. On the other hand, if you do not answer a question, where you are not the accused, it can be considered obstruction of justice. This leads to an interesting dilemma, since potentially, you can be asked a question when you’re not accused of a crime, where you’re compelled to answer, but that testimony can be used later as evidence in a trial against you. That situation is called Entrapment, and is technically illegal, though it’s difficult to argue either during questioning, or at a later trial where you are being accused of a crime, that entrapment took place. If you lied, your crime is purgery, if you told the truth, you essentially admitted to wrong doing. Additionally however, it’s difficult to prove a person knows something, and the last in
