Recording Interrogations

I once heard a police polygraph examiner speak, and he waxed poetically about the wonders of his machine and his tremendous skill in discerning the truth from a lie. (Nobody believes in the validity of a polygraph machine more than a polygraph examiner.) He went on to explain how he reviews the entire police case file, to form an opinion as to a suspect's guilt or innocence, before he administers the test - a peculiar way to prejudice the results if he in fact truly believes in the machine.

The examiner's most infamous case involved a confession elicited after an extended interrogation which culminated in a polygraph test. The Court of Appeals reviewed a videotape of the suspect's confession, and found him to be sleep and food deprived, and at the point of exhaustion. His confession was suppressed, and the prosecution had to proceed without it. He was ultimately convicted. (The videotape might have backfired on the prosecution had the Court of Appeals allowed the confession to be used, as a jury might have had questions about the tactics of a police agency which would interrogate a suspect in that condition.)

The polygrapher's police agency created a new policy to ensure that this wouldn't happen again. Allowing suspects to rest during marathon interrogations? Ensuring that adequate food was supplied to suspects at appropriate intervals? Hardly. They ordered that no further polygraph examinations would be videotaped. End of problem.

There have been some troubling "false confession" cases, such as the New Baltimore, Michigan teens who falsely confessed to a murder plainly committed by others. The prosecutor in that case insisted that the teens, who were separately interrogated and who separately confessed, knew things about the crime scene that only the offenders would know. Yet it has since become plain that the source of that information was the police during the interrogation.

There are also many cases involving police incompetence or misconduct, where police officers either misreport what a suspect has said (often when "condensing" an interview that took place over several hours into a paragraph or two for a police report, before destroying their notes from the actual interview), or deliberate misconduct. It is difficult to tell whether the two boys, aged 7 and 8, who allegedly confessed to murdering an 11-year-old girl in New York City were the victims of police incompetence or deliberate misconduct, but it is apparent that the police frequently fail to follow appropriate protocols when interviewing minors.

The New Yorker presented a detailed analysis of that case, and found one of the boys to have a learning disability which made it difficult for him to articulate even a single sentence - yet he supposedly had provided an extremely articulate, detailed narrative of the murder. Unlikely? To say the least. The worst aspect of that case is that the false accusations against the boys destroyed the opportunity to convict the probable offender - a man whose semen was found on the dead girl's underwear.

Today's New York Times editorializes in favor of recording all police interrogations, noting "Now a new study has found that in the small number of jurisdictions that record their interrogations, law enforcement has come to favor it." That's not difficult to believe - like the Miranda ruling, rules which effectively compel the police to engage in better, more professional practices make it more likely that a confession will be admitted into evidence, and more likely that it will be believed by a jury. Recording would also make it more difficult for a suspect to change or finesse his story. There's nothing wrong with that.