Opinion: The false choice between deceit and public safety
With the passage of recent legislation in Illinois, Oregon, and Utah and coverage by national media — including a recent segment on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver — the public has become aware of the maddening reality that law enforcement can and do lie to people in interrogations in order to trick them into confessing. They do this in spite of the well-documented risk this poses for eliciting false confessions and the proven reliability of other methods. In Connecticut alone, three innocent people — two adults and one child — have already been exonerated after being coerced by police into falsely confessing to murders they didn’t commit.
Right now, the Connecticut state legislature is deciding if courts should consider whether lies police tell to innocent suspects during an interrogation might have caused them to falsely confess. Senate Bill 306 would, for the first time, require prosecutors in Connecticut to demonstrate that a statement made by someone in interrogation is reliable, but only when law enforcement commits an act known to coerce false confessions such as lying and telling them that there was evidence they committed a crime. However, this seemingly straightforward reform to establish what most people likely already believed was the case is still meeting resistance.
Wicklander-Zulawski, one of the largest international law enforcement trainers, knows this decision all too well, as it chose to cease teaching this controversial technique entirely in 2017. The danger posed and the lack of necessity for it in modern policing is why WZ and the Innocence Project, along with other members of law enforcement and false confession experts, have joined together to support reforms such as SB306 to make sure legislatures know that rejecting deceit is a choice proven to enhance public safety.