S.B. 306, An Act Concerning Deceptive Interrogation Tactics

The ACLU-CT is committed to ending police violence and racism in policing in all forms. Accountability measures alone are not enough. Connecticut must also divest from policing and reinvest in programs that build strong and safe communities. To build an equitable future for all people in Connecticut, policymakers must reduce policing’s responsibilities, scale, and tools. We counseled this Committee in the summer of 2020 that a serious rethinking of policing is needed and that one bill would not solve the problems of policing in Connecticut’s communities. That caution is still true.

Under current Connecticut law and in most jurisdictions, it is completely legal for police to lie to people during a custodial interrogation about evidence and leniency, threaten use of force, and deny physical and mental health needs in order to obtain a confession. Although these deceptive interrogation tactics by police are commonplace, they frequently result in false confessions, and at least 29 percent of Connecticut’s wrongful convictions involve false confessions. Deceptive interrogation tactics by police, for example, were the cause of the wrongful convictions of the Central Park Five, where police told the five teenagers that the others had implicated them in the crime. The reasons to end deceptive interrogation tactics by police are many: an astounding lack of scientific evidence supporting its efficacy; disownment by leading experts, including police; disparate harm to our most vulnerable residents; and Connecticut’s own painful legacy of wrongful convictions stemming from deception.

Deceptive interrogation tactics ultimately harm the people whom our state has made most vulnerable: people of color, youth, and people with mental or physical disabilities. Black and Latinx people are overrepresented in the criminal legal system, including in exoneration databases and in instances of false confessions. People of color are more likely to be targeted by police, and scholars argue that cultural biases held by officers lead to more intense interrogation tactics against people of color who are accused of a crime. Youth are also particularly threatened by deceptive interrogation tactics because parts of the brain that control future planning, judgment, and decision-making are not fully developed until a person reaches their mid-twenties. The Innocence Project found that of the 211 exonerees who were wrongfully convicted as children, 36 percent falsely confessed, whereas 10 percent of exonerees who were wrongfully convicted over the age of eighteen falsely confessed. Use of deceptive tactics like the Reid technique on children has led to an alarmingly high rate of false confessions among juveniles, who are already at an increased risk for false confessions. Experts have also found that people living with mental and physical disabilities are also at particular risk for exploitation and manipulation during interrogation. People with intellectual or other developmental disabilities are demonstrably susceptible to false or coerced confessions.

People in Connecticut have directly suffered due to the use of deceptive interrogation tactics by police officers. The elevated vulnerability of people living with disabilities and youth when exposed to interrogation tactics has been demonstrated in Connecticut through several wrongful conviction cases, like those of Bobby Johnson and Richard LaPointe. Bobby Johnson was just sixteen years old when he was interrogated by police as a suspect in a homicide investigation. Police falsely told him that he was facing the death penalty and that he would never see his parents again unless he confessed. Johnson was interrogated outside the presence of his parents and had an IQ indicative of mental impairment.

In spite of this, detectives doubled down on him as their suspect, interrogating him multiple times in order to force him to change is coerced confession to fit new evidence. Johnson was sentenced to 38 years in prison, and ultimately spent nine years in prison before a judge vacated his conviction. Richard LaPointe was another Connecticut resident who was wrongfully convicted for a homicide after police used deceptive tactics during his interrogation, falsely telling LaPointe that they would imprison his wife and take away his son, and that his wife implicated him in the murder. LaPointe’s conviction was challenged due to the fact that LaPointe had been diagnosed with Dandy Walker syndrome, a congenital brain malformation of the cerebellum that impacted him physically and mentally. This syndrome, his lawyers successfully argued, would have rendered him unable to commit the crime, and that this syndrome which causes brain malformations in the cerebellum also made him more susceptible to a coerced false confession when the police interrogated him for nine and a half hours. After spending twenty-six years in prison, LaPointe’s conviction was dismissed.

In addition to the real, human harms to Connecticut residents because of antiquated deceptive interrogation tactics by police, they also result in enormous financial costs to the state. Suits resulting from wrongful convictions involving deceptive interrogations have alone cost Connecticut’s taxpayers at least $37.5 million in state compensation and an additional $10.74 million in civil settlements. Additional costs are incurred when cases are re-opened, the actual offender is identified, and cases involving false confessions are re-prosecuted. In light of Connecticut’s horrific experiences with deceptive interrogation tactics by police, the legislature must act now to ban the practice completely.

Senate Bill 306 confronts the issue of deceptive interrogation tactics head-on. The bill ends deceptive interrogation by police by creating a presumption that statements from custodial interrogations in which law enforcement knowingly used specific coercive and deceptive tactics are involuntary unless the presumption is overcome by clear and convincing evidence. The ACLU-CT strongly supports Senate Bill 306 as an essential step in creating a more fair and just criminal legal system and ending mass incarceration. Deceptive interrogation tactics are outdated and ineffective threats to justice. Connecticut has the opportunity to lead the nation as the first state to comprehensively abolish deceptive interrogation practices by police and the fourth to end the practice for our youngest and most vulnerable. This Committee must act now to ban deception by police during custodial interrogations and pass Senate Bill 306.