Draft:Police Interrogation

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Police Interrogation is one of the main ways for the police to gather information about a suspect in order to solve a crime. Of course throughout history the police have used many questionable methods to get the truth which results in both psychological harm as well as false convictions. While some people think these issues ended when police could no longer physically abuse suspects there are still many ways to get false confessions.

methods

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2014/05/jn "they are able to use a variety of powerful psychological ploys to extract confessions from criminal suspects, including the use of deception during interrogation. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed police to falsely claim that a suspect's confederate confessed when in fact he had not (Frazier v. Cupp, 1969) and to have found a suspect's fingerprints at a crime scene when there were none (Oregon v. Mathiason, 1977), determining such acts insufficient for rendering the defendant's confession inadmissible. State courts have permitted police to deceive suspects about a range of factual matters, including, for example, falsely stating that incriminating DNA evidence and satellite photography of the crime scene exist"

" courts tend to be intolerant of police misrepresenting a defendant's legal rights, such as telling a suspect that his or her incriminating statements will not be used to charge the suspect"

" the New York Court of Appeals unanimously concluded that the officers' conduct in eliciting incriminating statements from a father suspected of killing his infant son rendered the defendant's statements involuntary as a matter of law. The officers repeatedly offered false assurances that they believed the child's injuries were accidental and that the defendant would not be arrested, threatened to arrest the defendant's wife, and falsely told the defendant that his child was alive and the defendant should disclose what he did to save his child's life. The court ruled that these deceptive tactics, combined with a lengthy interrogation during which the defendant was hospitalized for suicidal ideation, all converged to overbear the defendant's will."

" Although most potential jurors view police tactics as coercive, they generally believe such tactics are necessary to elicit truthful confessions and unlikely to elicit false ones "

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/3/20/coerced-to-confess-how-us-police-get-confessions"

"It is legal in the US for police to lie about evidence and coercive interrogation techniques are often used, sometimes subjecting suspects to hours of verbal abuse, intimidation or conditions that are mentally and physically exhausting, resulting in the suspect seeing a confession as their only way out of the situation."

"Some states have taken preventive steps; almost half of US states require recording certain custodial interrogations, and in 2017 a major police consulting firm announced it would no longer teach the Reid Technique."

"One of the most famous examples of coerced confessions involved a group of five black and Hispanic teenagers who were interrogated for the beating and rape of a white woman who was jogging in New York City’s Central Park in 1989.

The boys were between 14 and 16 years old and were being held as suspects for another series of attacks that took place that night.

All five confessed to the crime after being interrogated for hours without lawyers, and according to them deprived of food and sleep. They were convicted despite giving accounts that were inconsistent with each other and the crime scene and no supporting DNA evidence."

"Chicago is considered the “false confessions capital” of the US. More than 30 percent of exonerations involving false confessions have come from Illinois state, according to the National Registry of Exonerations."

-able to lie about evidence and confession

-long interrogations to break down will

-abuse and interrogation

half the states don't require recording

selectively giving information

effects

The effect of these tactics is that innocent people are convinced to plead guilty. An example of this is the story of Huwe Burton who was kept in interrogation without a guardian at age 16 for 6 hours where they told him there was hard evidence he was the murderer, said they'd send him to jail for raping his girlfriend who was unrelated to the case and that it would be tried as an accident in family. After he confessed he was quickly ushered to criminal court where he was tried for murder as an adult and served 20 years. He was only exonerated through his school attendance. The detectives who orchestrated this coerced questionable confessions for several murders.

The psychological harm

statistics

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/2/good-cop-bad-cop-routine-produces-false-positives.html

More than a quarter of inmates wrongfully convicted but later exonerated made a false confession or incriminating statement, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit committed to exonerating wrongfully convicted people using DNA evidence. A new report finds that a record 27 inmates exonerated in 2015 were convicted on the basis of false confessions. More than 80 percent of them falsely confessed to murder.

Most studies show that a person’s ability to detect a lie is similar to a coin toss and that age and experience have little effect on that success rate. A 2001 study in The Psychology, Crime and Law journal involving 52 police officers found an average accuracy rate of only 50 percent. While three officers managed to detect a liar 80 percent of the time, three others had just 20 percent accuracy, and one test subject failed to distinguish truth from fiction in every test case.

Notably, while Reid’s instruction materials observe that in some cases “the probably innocent suspect turns out to be the guilty party,” they ignore the possibility that the opposite could be true. Questioners are instead told to use every effort to shut down a subject’s claims of innocence once an initial determination of guilt is made.

"There was no physical or circumstantial evidence tying Dassey to the crime. Instead, the state’s case against him was based solely on a wobbly confession that unfolded over many hours of highly suggestive police interrogation. Videos shown at trial depict a visibly confused Dassey being spoon-fed morsels of information about Halbach’s murder that he’s clearly hearing for the first time. After each bite, he regurgitates the details back to the officers, who nod in approval as he digs his own grave. "

“a frighteningly high percentage of people confess to crimes they never committed.”

" A 2001 study in The Psychology, Crime and Law journal involving 52 police officers found an average accuracy rate of only 50 percent. While three officers managed to detect a liar 80 percent of the time, three others had just 20 percent accuracy, and one test subject failed to distinguish truth from fiction in every test case."

"The good news is we don’t need to start from scratch. Police in the United Kingdom, Norway and New Zealand all now use a nonaccusatory model of interrogation that grants suspects space to tell their stories uninterrupted and focuses on revealing inconsistencies through factual analysis rather than tricking them into admissions of guilt.

Under the preparation and planning, engage and explain, account, closure and evaluate method, developed in the U.K. in 1980s, investigators are prohibited from deceiving suspects during an interview. The Canadian police began using the system last year."

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/nyregion/3-detectives-obtained-a-false-murder-confession-was-it-one-of-dozens.html

"But in some instances, the police and prosecutors moved too fast, made mistakes and ignored or withheld evidence that suggested they had the wrong person, exoneration experts say."

"In a federal lawsuit filed in December, Mr. Burton accused the detectives of using lies, a false promise and a threat to persuade him to admit to something he had not done. He asserts that the detectives, to protect their reputations, and the prosecutor pressed ahead with the charges even after learning he had an alibi."

"official misconduct played a role in the criminal convictions of more than half of 2,400 Americans who were exonerated between 1989 and 2019. For Black men wrongly convicted of murder, the proportion was 78 percent."

"The contents of Ms. Burton’s purse were scattered on the floor and her car was missing, but there was no evidence of rape or of a struggle, the papers said. Ms. Burton’s husband was in Jamaica at the time.

Two hours into the roughly six-hour interrogation, Detective Viggiano started to bluff the teenager, pretending there was evidence that he was the killer, Mr. Burton and his lawyer in the federal suit, Jonathan C. Moore, said.

In an interview, Mr. Burton recalled breaking into tears and crying out: “I didn’t kill my mom.”

It is not illegal in New York for the police to deceive suspects about evidence to get a confession. Although state courts have thrown out some confessions obtained through such tactics, they have not banned the practice.

Mr. Burton said in an interview and in court papers that Detective Viggiano had warned him that if he did not confess to the killing, he could still go to prison for the statutory rape of his girlfriend, who was 13, and that rapists were abused in prison.

If he confessed, the detectives said, his mother’s death would be treated as an accident in Family Court and he would be released to his father, Mr. Burton said."