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Key points
- Police are allowed to lie during custodial interrogations, yet deception increases the risk of coerced and false confessions from adolescents.
- Alternatives to deception do exist, and rapport-based interviewing can elicit actionable information without undue coercion.
- Several legislatures have banned police use of deception with juveniles.
By Hayley Cleary, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Public Policy, Virginia Commonwealth University; David Thompson, CFI, President, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates
Did you know that police are legally allowed to lie to suspects when interrogating them? Many people don’t. Did you know that police can also lie to kids? Most parents don’t. Yet deception is a time-honored tool in the American police interrogator’s toolbox, and police sometimes use the same coercive tactics with juvenile suspects as they use with adults.
Developmental scientists, social psychologists, and interrogation researchers have long known that using deception during criminal interrogations is a dangerous practice. False evidence ploys—a tactic where police tell suspects they have “foolproof” evidence of their guilt such as DNA or incriminating eyewitness testimony to get them to confess—increase the risk of false confessions from innocent suspects. Even for youthful suspects who are actually guilty, the power imbalance between interrogators (as adult legal authority figures) and youth suspects (as legally unsophisticated, accused minors) severely disadvantages youth in ways that raise big questions about due process.
Recently, several state legislatures (IL, OR, UT, CA, and DE) recognized these dangers when they banned police deception in juvenile interrogations. In doing so, legislators heeded the warnings of youth advocates, interrogation scholars, practitioners, and—most importantly—exonerees who falsely confessed and were wrongfully convicted. The message was clear: Police lying to youth does more harm than good.
Developmental psychologists and law enforcement professionals often find themselves on different sides of this issue. Researchers emphasize youths’ developmental immaturity and vulnerability to coercion, while police experts claim that deception is sometimes a necessary means to an important end: public safety. While these positions may seem at odds, we’re here to explain why that doesn’t have to be the case.
What Developmental Science Has to Say About Lying to Adolescents
From a developmental perspective, adolescent brains are hardwired to respond to immediate rewards. Youth are literally less able to think about future consequences of confession because the planning and abstract thinking areas of their brains are still developing. Youth are also more suggestible than adults and more likely to change their statements when authority figures communicate dissatisfaction with their answers.
Police are trained to use leading questions, interrupt suspects’ attempts to resist, and offer excuses that make the crime seem less serious. Allowing police to lie—especially when youth don’t know they can—further perpetuates the imbalance of knowledge and power in the interrogation room.
Huwe Burton knows this all too well. Huwe was just 16 years old when he discovered his mother’s body murdered in her bedroom when he came home from school. Police zeroed in on the traumatized boy, interrogated him for 3 hours, and coerced a confession that was riddled with errors. Burton served 19 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.
Now exonerated, Burton's successful federal lawsuit denounced detectives for using lies and false promises to secure his confession. We had the great honor of testifying alongside Burton before the Oregon legislature as he shared his powerful, tragic story with policymakers, and his story continues to inspire critical legal and law enforcement reforms.
Interviewer Perspectives on Using Deceit in Interrogations
From a law enforcement perspective, police worry that banning deception handcuffs the investigator instead of the criminals. This same concern—that nobody would talk to the police anymore—surfaced 50 years ago when the Supreme Court mandated Miranda warnings for custodial interrogations. This concern was ultimately unfounded. The prophylactic Miranda warnings have proven to be a weak procedural safeguard, and new research shows criminal suspects may actually be quite willing to cooperate with police under the right circumstances—for example, if they are treated with dignity, if they perceive there is strong incriminating evidence against them, or if they already decided confession was in their best interest.
Police also sometimes criticize deception bans on the grounds that local departments already have internal policies advising against using deception with youth. While well-intentioned, these policies lack the teeth to protect vulnerable or innocent suspects. In reality, the extraordinary pressure to close cases often results in police pushing the boundaries of policy and best practices in the name of justice. Without courtroom accountability or public scrutiny, police culture invariably trumps policy. The reality is that police work is dangerous, difficult, and stressful, and we recognize how the public pressures police to solve crimes and close cases. We need to give law enforcement better tools to acquire accurate, reliable information.
Defining a Path Forward
Fortunately, better alternatives do exist. Globally, the United Nations released guiding principles that promote evidence-based techniques to resolve cases. Agencies across the U.S. are transforming the way they conduct investigative interviews, to great success. The development of rapport and a humanistic approach to conversation is proven to be more effective in obtaining truthful information. Investigators are changing the way they question interviewees, becoming better active listeners and focusing on open-ended questions rather than leading, coercive statements.
We both understand that police face the difficult task of uncovering information from often unwilling interviewees. But police can’t build trust with their communities if deception is built into the system. Though we—a juvenile interrogation scholar and leading police trainer—represent very different stakeholders when it comes to interrogating youth, we agree there is a path forward. In the spirit of protecting communities, redressing victims’ harm, and respecting suspects’ due process, it’s time to retire deception as a tool in investigators’ toolbox and evolve the way police investigate crime. It’s time to stop lying to kids.
Ashley M. Votruba, J.D., Ph.D., SPSSI Blog Editor, Assistant Professor, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
