PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects are to widely used interrogation methods such as the notorious ‘Reid Technique.’ As all too many of this Blog's post have shown, I also recognize that pressure for false confessions can take many forms, up to and including physical violence, even physical and mental torture.
Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Rep. Lipper-Garabedian first introduced the bill last year. It didn’t move far, as just one of more than 6,000 bills filed that year, and with the judiciary committee facing a particularly heavy load. First-year bills often simply kick off conversation and education on the issue and get momentum started. This year, the bill gained a Senate co-sponsor, but legislators face a similar flood of bills and co-sponsors and say it’s too early to predict how far this measure will progress. In addition to its measures addressing police use of deception, the bill would also require officers to create audiovisual recordings of interrogations. Many bills, even those without any opposition, take even a decade or more to pass, says Senate co-sponsor Sen. Pat Jehlen. Still, attention is building. The past several years have seen 10 states ban deception when interrogating youth, and a separate Senate bill introduced this year would do the same for Massachusetts."
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NETWORKED KNOWLEDGE MEDIA REPORT: 17 March 2025 - Governing.com - Massachusetts Legislators Want to Discourage from lying to suspects. (Governing provides news, analysis and insights for the people making government work. Published since 1987, Governing is a trusted source of record for people who lead, manage and direct public agencies as they work towards well-managed, vibrant and resilient communities. Our Mission & Vision: Today’s state and local leaders govern during a period of dramatic shifts in technology, demography, climate and the economy that are driving societal transformation. Governing tells their stories, extracting lessons and emerging practices in innovation and performance. Our mission is to be a reliable and essential resource to help public leaders identify novel approaches to both entrenched and emerging challenges serving residents and running their organizations. To achieve this mission, Governing has assembled a team of experienced journalists, policy experts, historians, scholars and former public officials. Together, they offer an intelligent take on innovation and performance in state and local government found nowhere else.) HL;
GIST: "It’s often legal for officers to deceive suspects, but critics say this can lead to false
confessions. Experts have mixed opinions about whether restricting the practice would affect case closure rates.
Police often deceive people they question, for example, lying about having DNA evidence
that incriminates them.
Officers’ goals are to persuade guilty people to confess, but such
tactics can pressure innocent people to confess, too.
People sometimes make false confessions because they fear they cannot prove their innocence and hope to get leniency, or because it’s the only way to get out of an arduous interrogation.
Several states bar police from deceiving youth, but Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill that would restrict deceiving adults, too.
The bill would prevent confessions from being admitted as evidence in court, unless the commonwealth can prove the confessions were voluntary, reliable and not obtained via deception.
It was 2008 and 16-year-old Nga Truong’s baby had been dead for 27 hours. Police officers
in Worcester, Mass., told the teenager that they had evidence her baby was smothered.
Officers suggested confessing to killing the baby would make things easier for Truong, and
said if she confessed, she’d get minimal punishment and people would help her and her
brothers get into better living conditions.
It wasn’t true: the medical examiner hadn’t yet determined the cause of death, and police
couldn’t promise outcomes.
But it convinced Truong, who had repeatedly denied harming her child, to confess. She spent nearly three years in jail before her confession was thrown out, with a judge deeming it coerced.
In Truong’s case, the court found several different coercive factors in combination were
enough to make her confession involuntary
But in Massachusetts, and many jurisdictions, police lying about evidence or implying leniency to get a suspect's confession isn’t enough to make those confessions inadmissible in court.“Police officers cannot misrepresent a defendant’s constitutional rights,“ writes Boston-area Defense Law Attorney Paul Moraski, “but they can lie about what type of evidence they have on the suspect” and use deceptive tactics like “sympathizing with the defendant and displaying understanding, as well as minimizing the severity of the offense."
Police interrogations can be intense, sometimes people are held for long hours, in emotional distress.
Under such conditions, some innocent people confess to crimes they didn't commit. Many
hope confessing will get them out of the situation and the truth will win out.
Robert Hoffman, a retired former chief of the Plainfield Police Department in Connecticut,
says he remembers a case from nearly 20 years ago when an outside agency investigating a
case coerced false confessions from teenagers accused of assaulting someone at a bus stop.
Six people confessed to the crime, despite eyewitnesses saying there were only four
assailants.
“They were interviewing people a little too aggressively,” Hoffman says, adding that the
pressure of interrogations can sometimes cause people to falsely confess in desperation.
“You know yourself that you didn’t do it, and you believe the police officer and everybody else will see the truth eventually. So, you go ahead and say, ‘Yeah, I did it,’ and hopefully they’ll let you go. But often that doesn’t happen: your confession is what puts you behind bars,” he says.
Moreover, juries often don’t understand why someone innocent would falsely confess,
making it difficult for people to argue their cases, says Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project.
Lawmakers in Massachusetts want to discourage police from using deception to get
confessions.
A current bill, An Act Preventing False Confessions, would make it so that if the
commonwealth wants to admit a confession as evidence in court, it must first prove the
statement was voluntary, reliable and not the result of deception.
If law enforcement “knowingly or recklessly engages in deception” during interrogation, the suspect’s statements will be assumed to be coerced. “Deception,” the bill clarifies, includes in any way conveying “false or misleading” facts or evidence, “unauthorized implicit or explicit offers of leniency,” or anything else a court deems misleading.
What’s At Risk?
False confessions and wrongful convictions are devastating to the individual and their loved
ones.
They're also expensive; victims' compensation in wrongful conviction cases doesn'tcome cheap.
And they put public safety at risk.
While in some cases no crime actually occurred, sometimes arson convictions are made over fires that are later found to have been accidental, in other cases, the actual perpetrator remains at large or gets away.
Presenting false evidence to a genuinely guilty suspect during interrogation can also reveal to them the limits of police knowledge.
If the fabricated evidence conflicts with actual facts of the case, it alerts the guilty suspect to what police don’t know, removing pressure to confess, says Doug Woody, a University of Northern Colorado professor who researches psychology and law, including police interrogation.
Plus, court trials and studies have shown that when evidence and confessions conflict, people, police, forensic examiners, witnesses and others, tend to believe the confession, Woody says.
A 2006 U.K. study found that fingerprint examiners who re-examined fingerprints after being told that a particular suspect had confessed became more likely to change their analysis to point to the confessor.
Do Police Need Deception?
Deception was once seen as a reform. As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, it was common for police to use torture when interrogating adults and children. Growing push-back prompted change, and in the 1940s and 1950s, deception was upheld as a more humane alternative, Woody says.
A small, but growing, portion of law enforcement has been moving away from
some forms of deception, like presenting false evidence.
In 2024, 12 percent of surveyed officers said they never use deception, compared to 8 percent who said the same in 2007.
The past 30 years have seen growing interest in friendlier approaches that are not deceptive,
not confrontational and not accusatory.
Such techniques can include treating suspects politely and putting them at ease, asking them open-ended questions and avoiding leading questions.
Such methods can bring real value: meta analyses of experimental studies on police
interrogation find that confrontational approaches increase rates of both genuine and false
confessions.
Meanwhile, experimental studies found that interrogations that use rapport- building techniques led to fewer false confessions and more true confessions, Woody says.
Bill co-sponsor Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian believes deception should go the way of blood
spatter analysis and other discounted policing methods of the past: “this is simply not a
reliable tool for law enforcement.”
Steven A. Drizin, director emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, believes police have plenty of other ways to solve crimes, noting “such tactics are not allowed in many other countries in Europe, including the U.K., and it does not appear to have hurt their conviction rates.” (Drizin was part of the effort that made Illinois the first state to bar police from using deception when interrogating juveniles.)
In Hoffman’s view, deception should be used sparingly and carefully.
Officers should restrict themselves to telling just one lie, in part because any more makes them seem unreliable when presenting their case in court: “It doesn’t really look good to the jury that the police officer was lying repeatedly. It’s best not to have any of that stuff muddy up the case.”
But he generally thinks deception is a tool officers should retain some access to. "If you just
can't use it anymore, ever, sometimes you might be letting somebody go. Because that might
have been the only way to get this particular person to tell you the truth, is to tell them a lie,
like, ‘Your partner's already given you up,’ or ‘The evidence we found is much worse [than
you think],” Hoffman says.
Officers should explain why they had to lie when writing up their reports, and they should
never use scare tactics or threats of physical violence in an interrogation, he says.
And any case that hinges entirely on the confession, without eyewitnesses and physical evidence also backing it up, isn’t a strong case.
Other interrogation strategies, like just keeping silent and seeing if the suspect says something incriminating, can be more effective, Hoffman says.
As can taking a friendly approach, an interrogation and interview strategy he trained on at the FBI National Academy.
How Different Are Adults?
Some states bar officers from lying to minors, in recognition that youth are more likely to
make false confessions.
That’s because they’re more susceptible to social pressure, more likely to give in to authority, more impulsive and less likely to consider the long-term consequences of their actions, like imprisonment, over short-term benefits, like ending the interrogation.
But just because adults are less susceptible doesn’t mean they’re not susceptible at all. Per Lipper-Garabedian, “Two-thirds of all known false confessions nationwide were given by adults over the age of 18.”
Some adults can be particularly vulnerable, too, like those who are not fluent in English and
those who have cognitive impairments, mental illness or are in particularly emotionally
distressing situations, such as if the case involved the death of a loved one.
Victor Rosario — a Massachusetts man who was ultimately exonerated after serving more than 30 years in prison — was found to have confessed after an eight-hour interrogation, during which he was delirious from alcohol withdrawal.
Will It Pass?
Rep. Lipper-Garabedian first introduced the bill last year.
It didn’t move far, as just one of more than 6,000 bills filed that year, and with the judiciary committee facing a particularly heavy load.
First-year bills often simply kick off conversation and education on the issue and
get momentum started.
This year, the bill gained a Senate co-sponsor, but legislators face a similar flood of bills and co-sponsors and say it’s too early to predict how far this measure will progress.
In addition to its measures addressing police use of deception, the bill would also require officers to create audiovisual recordings of interrogations.
Many bills, even those without any opposition, take even a decade or more to pass, says
Senate co-sponsor Sen. Pat Jehlen.
Still, attention is building. The past several years have seen 10 states ban deception when interrogating youth, and a separate Senate bill introduced this year would do the same for Massachusetts.
Woody says letting police use deception could undermine people’s faith in the justice system: “A suspect who lies to police commits a crime; when police lie to a suspect in an
interrogation room in a lot of states, that's just Wednesday.”
Hoffman, however, doesn’t think deception affects police-community relationships much: “I don’t think most people realize that it goes on.”
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The entire story can be read at:
Networked Knowledge:
Confessions29.pdf
Governing. com:
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
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FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
