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Of every developmentally disabled person the American justice system has eventually admitted it wrongly convicted, nearly three quarters got there by confessing to a crime they did not commit. For exonerees without a disability, the figure is nine percent. Seventy-two against nine. And the technique that produces those confessions is legal in forty-eight states.
To share some background on this subject, it’s helpful to mention that I spent most of the Biden Administration leading research on policing policy that can prioritize human rights while enhancing public safety, as well as advocating for law enforcement reform with elected officials. My priorities have obviously shifted since then, but that work was my bread and butter for those years and I genuinely enjoyed it.
Recently, I was having coffee with a state house member. These conversations mean much more to me than speaking to a governor because the governor will generally tell me they love the ideas and are “excited to look into it.” The state and city level is different. With some persistence, good ideas are heard and enthusiastically acted on at the local level.
She and I were going through the list of her colleagues, trying to figure out which of them might sponsor which piece of model legislation. She has public safety as a top priority for her very split district. Public safety is a smart move for her to focus on, she has the tough job of keeping both the local Indivisible chapter and the police union on her side. Coalition building is absolutely necessary and she has done an exceptional job at it. So at some point she asked whether I had anything in that bucket.
I let her know, “I have a list ready for just about everything, ma’am.”
All the juicy bipartisan public safety policy ideas were in front of me within 30 seconds, along with a few long shots thrown in. Now it was time to step up to the plate or the basket or whichever sport metaphor you want to use that might help you understand how much I love these moments.
So I had ten policy ideas for police reform sitting in a document I’d been adding to during the Biden administration, post-BLM, when there was a particular enthusiasm for reform that materialized into roughly 10% of the policy wins we had hoped for. So it goes.
I started running through the list.
Officer liability insurance carried by the officer, not the department. So the taxpayer isn’t on the hook for officer misconduct.
Automatic enforceable codes of conduct with serious teeth for egregious circumstances and with non-law enforcement investigative staff that are completely separate to avoid the “we investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” problem.
State decertification authority so a fired officer can’t get hired in the next county.
Twenty-four-hour response teams for restraining order and harassment order enforcement, paid for by reallocating SWAT funding or other team funding in areas where some teams are underutilized and overfunded.
An independent civilian office with authority to audit police reporting.
Having officers no longer carry firearms unless a call warrants it; obviously one of the long shot policies but it has legitimate working cases and helps make everything look more “reasonable by comparison.”
When I got to the one about banning police from knowingly lying to developmentally disabled people and children during interrogations, she stopped me.
She said, “Wait, that’s a real thing? They’re allowed to do that?”
“Well, they can knowingly mislead anyone. Which shouldn’t be allowed and isn’t in most developed nations. But yes, in every state in the country except two, a police officer can sit across from a developmentally disabled adult and tell him his fingerprints are on a weapon he never touched, tell him a witness saw him do something he never did, tell him his friend already confessed and named him as the trigger man, and none of it has to be true. The officer can also say, ‘Look, if you admit what you did, the judge and jury will be much more understanding. Don’t you want to tell them your side so you don’t just look like a liar?’”
Her shock reminded me of an important lesson for everyone reading this to remember:
There are things you know far more about than your elected representative and moments where if you presented them with that information, it may influence them towards better policy in the future.
Back to the subject at hand. Nobody should be coerced into a confession. The disabled population is where the harm is most visible and most measurable, but the principle applies to everyone. Lying to extract a confession is coercion, and coercion produces false confessions, which don’t just put innocent people in prison; they let guilty people walk free. Every wrongful conviction is also a real perpetrator who closed the file on the wrong person and went home. The case ends when the confession comes in, and the actual person who committed the crime never gets caught. So when you hear someone defend deceptive interrogation as a tool for getting confessions out of guilty suspects, understand what they’re actually defending. A practice that produces convictions of innocent people and lets the guilty keep doing what they were doing.
The numbers tell you what this practice produces. The National Registry of Exonerations tracked every known wrongful conviction in the United States from 1989 through 2020 and found that 70 percent of people who falsely confessed and were later exonerated had a mental illness or intellectual disability. Children are two to three times more likely than adults to falsely confess, according to research cited by the Innocence Project. False confessions show up in roughly 30 percent of all DNA-based exonerations. In homicide cases, false confessions are the most common contributing factor to wrongful convictions.
In July of that 2021, illinois became the first state to ban deceptive interrogation tactics against anyone under eighteen. Governor JB Pritzker signed Senate Bill 2122 into law on July 15. The bill passed the Illinois House 114-0 and the Senate 47-1. The Illinois Chiefs of Police backed it. The Illinois State’s Attorneys’ Association backed it. The Cook County State’s Attorney’s office backed it. Republican legislators co-sponsored it, including Chris Bos, James Durkin, and Patrick Windhorst. The cops were on board. The prosecutors were on board. Both parties were on board. The day before, on July 14, Oregon Governor Kate Brown had signed substantively the same law, Senate Bill 418, sponsored by former police officer Senator Chris Gorsek and endorsed by the Oregon Association of Chiefs of Police and the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association.
The bill is three sentences of operative text. A law enforcement officer interrogating a person under eighteen, or a person with an intellectual or developmental disability, may not knowingly communicate false information about the existence of evidence, the statements of witnesses or co-defendants, the consequences the suspect faces, or the leniency available if they confess. Any statement obtained in violation of the rule is inadmissible in court. The disability provision applies when the officer knows or reasonably should know that the person being interrogated has a developmental disability, with intake screening procedures established by the state.
The version I’d push goes one step further than Illinois and Oregon and covers developmentally disabled adults too. The research on cognitive vulnerability does not stop at the eighteenth birthday, and the seventy-two percent figure is the floor, not the ceiling. The cases the system has surfaced are the ones with DNA evidence sitting in a lab, the ones with attorneys willing to file the petition, the ones where the truth caught up. The cases we cannot see are almost certainly worse.
Officers can still interrogate, confront suspects with real evidence, build rapport, ask hard questions, follow up on inconsistencies, and do every part of the job that produces accurate confessions. They just can’t fabricate evidence, manufacture witnesses, invent leniency deals, or promise outcomes they have no authority to deliver. The United States stands nearly alone among developed democracies on this. The United Kingdom replaced deceptive interrogation in 1992 with an information-gathering approach called the PEACE method, built around rapport, open questions, and strategic use of real evidence. The UK saw a significant reduction in false confessions after implementing it. New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada have either banned deceptive interrogation outright or replaced it with PEACE-style information-gathering as the operational standard. Sweden’s Code of Judicial Procedure explicitly forbids police from deceiving suspects. Norway’s KREATIV program, derived from PEACE, has been the national standard since 2002.
Additionally, the FBI’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, created after 9/11 to figure out how to get reliable information from terrorism suspects, validated information-gathering techniques nearly identical to PEACE. The FBI’s own 2016 report on the science of interrogation acknowledged that non-coercive, rapport-based methods are as effective as Reid for getting confessions from guilty suspects, without the drawbacks of sending innocent people to jail at an alarming rate.
If you’re a city or state legislator reading this, you’re looking at a career-defining bill.
A representative who sponsors this gets a campaign ad that writes itself. Thirty seconds. They can say on camera, “I wrote the law that stops police from lying to children and people with disabilities during interrogations. Police chiefs supported it. Prosecutors supported it. Republicans and Democrats voted for it together. Because confessions extracted through deception send innocent people to prison and leave the actual perpetrator free to keep hurting people.” No audience can argue with that ad.
The opposition ad does not exist. The cops endorsed the bill, so nobody can credibly run a soft-on-crime attack against the senator who passed it. The tying-officers’-hands attack collapses on first inspection because the bill leaves every legitimate interrogation technique intact. And with the chiefs of police standing at the signing ceremony in Illinois, the anti-police spot has video evidence working against it. Almost every police reform proposal hands ammunition to the opposition. This one gives them none.
The fiscal note is essentially zero. There is no new agency, no new program, no grants, no funding mechanism. The bill is short enough to draft in an afternoon. The implementation cost to departments is minimal, they already spend money on training and just swap out one method for another.
The moral coalition is already assembled. The Innocence Project produces exoneree spokespeople who are devastating in committee testimony. Terrill Swift, who spent over fifteen years in prison after being lied to as a teenager and is now exonerated, testified for the Illinois bill. Every state has its own Terrill Swift. Whoever sponsors this bill in your state gets to stand next to that person at the press conference, and that is the kind of moment a legislator builds a career around.
The bill passed in Illinois and Oregon for one reason. Someone in those states got it in front of a legislator and someone else made sure the legislator knew their constituents wanted it. The research is the same in your state, and can work in your city as well. The bill text is about the same. Find the representative and hand them the bill with the constituency behind it. The state level still works on merits.
So here is the action.
Find your representative at openstates.org by typing in your address. Send them an email and let them know you are a constituent. Tell them you support a state law banning police from using deceptive interrogation tactics on developmentally disabled people and minors. Tell them Illinois and Oregon have already passed substantively this law with bipartisan support and police chief backing. Attach the briefing below or paste it into the email body. Ask them whether they would consider sponsoring or co-sponsoring similar legislation in your state.
Back to that conversation with the State House member.
She wanted me to send the info over and is setting up a chat with their town police chief.
Seeing her enthusiasm over this made a light bulb go off for me, it was incredible.
There are laws, bills, statutes, and so many other mechanisms for change that can be implemented at the city, state, tribal, and local level that can find enthusiastic bipartisan support while actually helping human beings in substantive and meaningful ways.
I love this shit.
You can find the one sheet explainer linked as a formatted PDF and a copy pastable text at the very bottom of this article.
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If you’re reading this on desktop, you can copy and paste the text below directly into your email to your state representative. If you’re on mobile or would otherwise prefer the formatted PDF, it’s available here for download.
One-Page Legislative Briefing
Banning Police Deception in Interrogations of Minors and Developmentally Disabled Persons
Model Bill
The Bill
A law enforcement officer interrogating a person under eighteen, or a person with an intellectual or developmental disability, may not knowingly communicate false information about the existence of evidence, the statements of witnesses or co-defendants, the consequences the suspect faces, or the leniency available if they confess. Any statement obtained in violation of the rule is inadmissible in court. The disability provision applies when the officer knows or reasonably should know that the person being interrogated has a developmental disability, with intake screening procedures established by the state.
The Research
Of every developmentally disabled person the American justice system has eventually exonerated, 72 percent got there by confessing to a crime they did not commit. For exonerees without a disability, the figure is 9 percent. Source: National Registry of Exonerations.
70 percent of all exonerees who falsely confessed had a mental illness or intellectual disability. Source: National Registry of Exonerations, 1989 to 2020.
Children are 2 to 3 times more likely than adults to falsely confess. False confessions appear in approximately 30 percent of DNA-based exonerations and are the most common contributing factor in homicide wrongful convictions. Sources: Innocence Project; American Bar Association.
The Mechanism
Lying to extract a confession is coercion. Coercion produces false confessions. False confessions do not just convict the innocent. They close the file on the wrong person, which means the actual perpetrator is never caught. Every wrongful conviction obtained through deception is also a public safety failure.
Precedent
Illinois (2021). Senate Bill 2122 (Public Act 102-0101) banned deceptive interrogation tactics against minors. Signed by Governor JB Pritzker on July 15, 2021. Passed the Illinois House 114-0 and the Senate 47-1. Endorsed by the Illinois Chiefs of Police, the Illinois State’s Attorneys’ Association, and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office. Co-sponsored by Republican legislators including Chris Bos, James Durkin, and Patrick Windhorst. Bill text: https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/102/SB/10200SB2122.htm
Oregon (2021). Senate Bill 418 enacted substantively the same law. Signed by Governor Kate Brown on July 14, 2021. Sponsored by Senator Chris Gorsek, a former police officer. Endorsed by the Oregon Association of Chiefs of Police and the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association. Bill text: https://innocenceproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2021-Oregon-SB-418-Rebuttable-Presumption-re-Juvenile-Police-Deception.pdf
International. The United Kingdom replaced deceptive interrogation in 1992 with the PEACE method. New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada have followed similar non-coercive, information-gathering standards. The FBI’s own High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group has validated nearly identical techniques and acknowledged in its 2016 report that this approach is as effective as Reid for obtaining confessions from guilty suspects.
The Political Case
The Illinois bill passed with police chief endorsement, prosecutor endorsement, and unanimous House support across both parties. There is no opposition coalition with a credible argument. The fiscal note is essentially zero. The bill text is short. PEACE-style training is already available through federal channels.
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