Writer: Madeline Odau
Editor: Kayla Buth
Fall 2023
Many individuals in the United States assume, without any fault of their own, that police do not lie on the job. The justice system hinges on people speaking the whole truth and nothing but the truth in court, and for every actor in the system to follow a strict set of rules in which they are to uphold the rights of the people they are sworn to protect and represent. However, with few specific exceptions, the police are given full authority to manipulate a confession or evidence out of a person if they believe they are guilty– eliciting wrongful convictions and raising distrust in the community that they are supposed to help.
Many people do not know that they have the option to refuse to communicate with the police. Many do know that they have the right to plead the fifth and decline to answer self-incriminating questions, as many crime shows love to emphasize year after year, yet there are still numerous deceptive tactics the police are allowed to use to trick suspects into self-incriminating. Police can offer a person a cigarette, a drink of water, or some food. This may seem like a kind gesture, but more often than not they are gaining fingerprints and other DNA and bypassing the Fourth Amendment limitations of evidence because technically they did receive consent. Same with trash, as soon as a person throws anything away outside of their personal residence it is considered public property that the police can investigate. Even further, a person could be stuck in interrogation for hours on end. They could be strapped to a polygraph test, asked leading questions, and then lied to about the results to coerce a confession (Browning & Long PLLC, 2023). This deception and other kinds used during interrogation and otherwise can and have historically been causes of wrongful convictions, specifically and strategically manipulating the most vulnerable to believe they have no other option but to confess even if they were not the perpetrators the police are searching for.
A lot of the recent arguments about setting more limits on these tactics boils down to the research done by the Innocence Project and the cases they have argued exoneration for. The naivety of juvenile suspects leads to high rates of vulnerability to deceptive police tactics, and of the 268 exonerees researched that were convicted as children, a reported 34 percent confessed under pressure when they had truly done no wrong as compared to the 10 percent of those who confessed under the same circumstances as adults (The Innocence Project, 2022).
Two famous examples of this notion of juvenile suspects being the most vulnerable to such deceptive tactics come from Bobby Johnson, a teen from Connecticut who was forced to spend 7 wrongful years in prison before his confession was found to be coerced and untruthful, and perhaps even more well-known, the Exonerated Five, originally known as the Central Park Five.
On August 1, 2006, 70-year-old Herbert Fields was fatally shot as he sat in his car in New Haven, Connecticut, and the suspect who was brought to court was 16-year-old Bobby Johnson after being framed by the original perpetrators. Bobby Johnson was lied to and told by the police that he would face the death penalty if he did not confess because they had evidence tying him to the scene of the crime despite their lack of investigation into the DNA samples they really had. With no contact with his parents or any outsiders– he also held no formal education, so he was not aware of the power that the government truly held– he confessed, even though he had not been involved (The National Registry of Exonerations, 2018).
On a similar note, the Exonerated Five, originally known as the Central Park Five, were notorious for many years for their suspected involvement in a brutal raping and murder of a jogging woman through Central Park that reached national news, and the five teens from Harlem– Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise– were tried and convicted even though none of them were involved. The police had told each individual that the others had confessed that they were involved, and after 30 hours of interrogation and repeated leading questions to ‘fix’ their confessions to be consistent with the case, the five were incarcerated (The Exonerated 5, n.d.).
Both of these cases remained closed until years later when in Johnson’s case, the solution was time and many attempts to get the case reexamined, and with the Exonerated Five, when a known rapist confessed to the crime and the DNA now able to be tested did, in fact, tie him to the scene. Even though in both cases, police used their ‘discretion’ to the furthest degree and abused the rights of those involved, none of the police involved in either of these cases were punished.
According to Jerome Skolnick, a current professor at New York University, “Hard and fast rules limiting police conduct may challenge common sense, while the absence of such rules may invite arbitrary and abusive conduct.” Police have more discretion than any other level of the justice system because of this, yet without rules, the police can and will continue to lock up innocent people by a sleight of their hand. Skolnick also describes that deception is seen as natural to detecting crime by police as pouncing is to a cat, so arguing that deceptive and manipulative tactics are only central to the ‘bad apples’ is not applicable.
To conclude, setting more specific rules while still allowing for some discretion is the clearest route to diminishing wrongful convictions of this nature. Rules such as this already exist, for example, the police cannot use religion against a suspect to coerce a confession. Especially in the last few years, there has also been an increase in regulations regarding police deception tactics against minors, who are argued to be much more vulnerable to them than adults. The Illinois Compiled Statutes (ILCS) details this prohibition in incredibly reasonable terms that would not only be beneficial, but also, crucial for the states that have not yet adopted such regulations. If deception is as natural to police as pouncing is to a cat, why does our nation allow all of its citizens to become prey? If police are supposed to be guardians, why in the current state of our world do we so often liken them to predators?
References
Bobby Johnson—National Registry of Exonerations. (2018, September 12). Retrieved
October 12, 2023, from https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=4751
Long, Howard. Tactics the Police Could Use to Get You to Confess to Committing a Crime.
(n.d.). Browning & Long PLLC. Retrieved October 12, 2023, from https://www.browninglonglaw.com/library/how-the-police-could-trick-you-into-confessing.cfm
Quiroz, Nigel. (2022, May 13). Five Facts About Police Deception and Youth You Should
Know. Innocence Project. https://innocenceproject.org/news/police-deception-lying-interrogations- youth-teenagers/
705 ILCS 405/5-401.6. (2022, January 1). Sec. 5-401.6. Prohibition of Deceptive Tactics.
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/documents/070504050K5-401.6.htm
Skolnick, J. H. (1982). Deception by police. Criminal Justice Ethics, 1(2), 40–54.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0731129X.1982.9991705
The Exonerated 5. (n.d.). Dr. Yusef Salaam. Retrieved October 12, 2023, from
https://www.yusefspeaks.com/the-exonerated-5
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