Police Deception during Interrogation and Its Surprising Influence on Jurors' Perceptions of Confession Evidence
Krista Forrest and William D. Woody review the literature on police deception in interrogation and review a recent study of juror perceptions and decisions in cases involving confessions and police deception. Two experienced trial consultants respond with reactions based on years of experience in this area.
 Full Article |
Recommendations from the authors
Our improved understanding of jurors' perceptions of and decisions about cases involving police deception during interrogation suggests a series of practical recommendations for litigators. What factors should attorneys consider when going to trial in the cases involving confessions and police deception during interrogation?
1. Defense attorneys should attempt to introduce an expert witness in the area of false confessions to educate jurors about the little-known, manipulative, and potentially deceptive nature of police interrogation. Rather than focusing primarily on the defendant, we recommend that defense attorneys focus instead on how interrogation strategies in general and false-evidence ploys in particular have been shown to influence voluntariness and even elicit false confessions in laboratory studies and archival cases.
2. If the interrogation includes police deception in general or false-evidence ploys in specific, defense attorneys should interview the police officers who interrogated the defendant. Defense attorneys should assess the extent to which these deceptive techniques are considered typical in that officer's working climate and the degree to which deception is involved, if at all, in the particular case.
3. If audio or video evidence of the interrogation has not been suppressed and the interrogators used false-evidence ploys, defense attorneys should identify and discuss each ploy for the jury.
4. In addition to explicit false-evidence ploys, as discussed in this paper, in which investigators explicitly claim to have nonexistent evidence, we also encourage defense attorneys to seriously evaluate implicit false-evidence ploys, called bait questions by Inbau et al. (2001) and Jayne and Buckley (1999). Inbau et al. (2001) state that an implicit false-evidence ploy "is nonaccusatory in nature but at the same time presents to the subject a plausible probability of the existence of some evidence implicating him in the crime" (p. 193). For example, if a suspect has denied that he or she was near the crime scene, an investigator might ask whether the suspect would appear on a hidden camera at the scene without directly claiming that such a recording exists or has been evaluated by police. In an implicit false-evidence ploy there is not an explicit lie about evidence, and legal scholars and social scientists have only recently begun to examine these deceptive interrogation tactics (Gohara, 2006, Forrest, Woody & Hille, 2010; Perillo & Kassin, 2010). Explicit and implicit claims of evidence are legally distinct. For example, Inbau et al. (2001) and Jayne and Buckley (1999) extensively discuss and defend the legality of explicit false-evidence ploys, but neither examines the legality of implicit false-evidence ploys. Despite these distinctions, both explicit and implicit false-evidence ploys induce false confessions at similar rates (Perillo & Kassin, 2010), and jurors cannot distinguish between them (Forrest et al., 2010). In other words, even if investigators used a seemingly less deceptive implicit false-evidence ploy, defense attorneys should have the same concerns that they would have regarding an explicit false-evidence ploy.
5. Prosecutors should advise police detectives about the potential trial outcomes that stem from deception during interrogation. Not only do false-evidence ploys increase the likelihood of false confessions in experimental studies as well as in the archival data, false-evidence ploys may also lead a jury to perceive the interrogation as more deceptive and coercive. Police deception only marginally decreased the likelihood of conviction in this study, but these changes in jurors' perceptions of deception and coercion raise important concerns. If police interrogators know that deception may reduce the chance of a conviction and lead to shorter sentences for confessing defendants, interrogators may choose to avoid deception during interrogation to reduce these risks. We have an ongoing study to evaluate whether judges are subject to these biases in sentencing.
6. When appropriate, voir dire should include questions concerning false confessions and the degrees to which jurors see themselves and others as capable of making a false confession. As we found, jurors who believe that false confession is possible for others or for themselves are less likely to convict than are jurors who believe the myth of psychological interrogation (Woody et al., 2010).
7. Although the study discussed here assessed jurors' perceptions and decisions, we recommend that judges use caution when deciding whether to admit disputed confessions into trial, particularly when a confession follows police deception. We raise these concerns here due to potential effects on jurors, but we strongly recommend that judges consider the experimental and archival evidence that demonstrates that false confession becomes more likely when interrogators use false-evidence ploys (Stewart, Woody, & Pulos, 2010).
