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Professor's New Book Sheds Light on Hidden Corner of Justice System
Professor Richard Leo
While the idea of a false confession may seem inconceivable, the phenomenon of individuals confessing to crimes they did not commit has become increasingly common in this era of DNA exonerations. But why would an innocent person confess guilt?
Police interrogation techniques often provide the answer, writes USF School of Law Associate Professor Richard Leo in his new book, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Harvard University Press, 2008). Hidden from public view and rarely recorded, false confessions are often induced by psychological coercion--promising the suspect more lenient sentencing, for example--during an interrogation session characterized by isolation, accusation, confrontation, pressure, and flat-out lies.
"Police can tell a suspect that they have their DNA and fingerprints, even if in fact they have nothing," Leo said in an interview. One solution, Leo says, is to mandate the recording of all police interrogations.
Leo's book chronicles more than a century of police interrogation in the United States, from the use of physical torture to the rise psychological manipulation and the lie detector test.
At the turn of the century, police used the so-called third degree. "This is not fiction," Leo said. "The use of rubber hoses and worse on suspects were common methods used to elicit a confession." The use of physical force in police interrogations began to be outlawed by states in the 1930s, a move that would eventually give rise to psychological manipulation as an alternative method to draw out confessions.
Leo's book is based on more than a decade of research, including a significant amount of primary research most scholars in the area don't have. He has observed hundreds of police interrogation sessions, attended police interrogation courses and seminars, analyzed police department interrogation manuals, and interviewed dozens of police interrogators and criminal justice officials.
"When I was a graduate student working on my dissertation, I remember going to the library and thinking, I'm going to find out what happens in police interrogation rooms," he said. "There was no information."
University of San Diego Distinguished Professor of Law Yale Kamisar, one of the nation's foremost authorities on criminal procedure who is known as the "Father of Miranda," called Leo's book "the best book on police interrogation I have ever read.
"The chapter on the 'third degree' is fascinating--and it reveals that a century ago the city police of America were using some of the same harsh interrogation techniques that the CIA used after 9/11," Kamisar said.
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