In Brief:
- Police often deceive people they question — for example, lying about having DNA evidence that incriminates them. Officers’ goals are to persuade guilty people to confess, but such tactics can pressure innocent people to confess, too.
- People sometimes make false confessions because they fear they cannot prove their innocence and hope to get leniency, or because it’s the only way to get out of an arduous interrogation.
- Several states bar police from deceiving youth, but Massachusetts lawmakers are considering a bill that would restrict deceiving adults, too. The bill would prevent confessions from being admitted as evidence in court, unless the commonwealth can prove the confessions were voluntary, reliable and not obtained via deception.
It was 2008 and 16-year-old Nga Truong’s baby had been dead for 27 hours. Police officers in Worcester, Mass., told the teenager that they had evidence her baby was smothered. Officers suggested confessing to killing the baby would make things easier for Truong, and said if she confessed, she’d get minimal punishment and people would help her and her brothers get into better living conditions.
In Truong’s case, the court found several different coercive factors in combination were enough to make her confession involuntary. But in Massachusetts — and many jurisdictions — police lying about evidence or implying leniency to get a suspect's confession isn’t enough to make those confessions inadmissible in court.
“Police officers cannot misrepresent a defendant’s constitutional rights,“ writes Boston-area Defense Law Attorney Paul Moraski, “but they can lie about what type of evidence they have on the suspect” and use deceptive tactics like “sympathizing with the defendant and displaying understanding, as well as minimizing the severity of the offense."
Police interrogations can be intense — sometimes people are held for long hours, in emotional distress. Under such conditions, some innocent people confess to crimes they didn't commit. Many hope confessing will get them out of the situation and the truth will win out.
Robert Hoffman, a retired former chief of the Plainfield Police Department in Connecticut, says he remembers a case from nearly 20 years ago when an outside agency investigating a case coerced false confessions from teenagers accused of assaulting someone at a bus stop. Six people confessed to the crime, despite eyewitnesses saying there were only four assailants.
“They were interviewing people a little too aggressively,” Hoffman says, adding that the pressure of interrogations can sometimes cause people to falsely confess in desperation. “You know yourself that you didn’t do it, and you believe the police officer and everybody else will see the truth eventually. So, you go ahead and say, ‘Yeah, I did it,’ and hopefully they’ll let you go. But often that doesn’t happen: your confession is what puts you behind bars,” he says.
Moreover, juries often don’t understand why someone innocent would falsely confess, making it difficult for people to argue their cases, says Radha Natarajan, executive director of the New England Innocence Project.
Lawmakers in Massachusetts want to discourage police from using deception to get confessions. A current bill, An Act Preventing False Confessions, would make it so that if the commonwealth wants to admit a confession as evidence in court, it must first prove the statement was voluntary, reliable and not the result of deception. If law enforcement “knowingly or recklessly engages in deception” during interrogation, the suspect’s statements will be assumed to be coerced.
“Deception,” the bill clarifies, includes in any way conveying “false or misleading” facts or evidence, “unauthorized implicit or explicit offers of leniency,” or anything else a court deems misleading.
What’s At Risk?
False confessions and wrongful convictions are devastating to the individual and their loved ones. They're also expensive; victims' compensation in wrongful conviction cases doesn't come cheap. And they put public safety at risk. While in some cases no crime actually occurred — sometimes arson convictions are made over fires that are later found to have been accidental — in other cases, the actual perpetrator remains at large or gets away.
Presenting false evidence to a genuinely guilty suspect during interrogation can also reveal to them the limits of police knowledge. If the fabricated evidence conflicts with actual facts of the case, it alerts the guilty suspect to what police don’t know, removing pressure to confess, says Doug Woody, a University of Northern Colorado professor who researches psychology and law, including police interrogation.
Plus, court trials and studies have shown that when evidence and confessions conflict, people — police, forensic examiners, witnesses and others — tend to believe the confession, Woody says. A 2006 U.K. study found that fingerprint examiners who re-examined fingerprints after being told that a particular suspect had confessed became more likely to change their analysis to point to the confessor.
Do Police Need Deception?
Deception was once seen as a reform. As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, it was common for police to use torture when interrogating adults and children. Growing pushback prompted change, and in the 1940s and 1950s, deception was upheld as a more humane alternative, Woody says.
A small, but growing, portion of law enforcement have been moving away from some forms of deception, like presenting false evidence. In 2024, 12 percent of surveyed officers said they never use deception, compared to 8 percent who said the same in 2007.
The past 30 years have seen growing interest in friendlier approaches that are not deceptive, not confrontational and not accusatory. Such techniques can include treating suspects politely and putting them at ease, asking them open-ended questions and avoiding leading questions. Such methods can bring real value: meta analyses of experimental studies on police interrogation find that confrontational approaches increase rates of both genuine and false confessions. Meanwhile, experimental studies found that interrogations that use rapport-building techniques led to fewer false confessions and more true confessions, Woody says.
Bill co-sponsor Rep. Kate Lipper-Garabedian believes deception should go the way of blood spatter analysis and other discounted policing methods of the past: “this is simply not a reliable tool for law enforcement.”
Steven A. Drizin, director emeritus of the Center on Wrongful Convictions, believes police have plenty of other ways to solve crimes, noting “such tactics are not allowed in many other countries in Europe, including the U.K., and it does not appear to have hurt their conviction rates.” (Drizin was part of the effort that made Illinois the first state to bar police from using deception when interrogating juveniles.)
In Hoffman’s view, deception should be used sparingly and carefully. Officers should restrict themselves to telling just one lie, in part because any more makes them seem unreliable when presenting their case in court: “It doesn’t really look good to the jury that the police officer was lying repeatedly. It’s best not to have any of that stuff muddy up the case.”
But he generally thinks deception is a tool officers should retain some access to. "If you just can't use it anymore, ever, sometimes you might be letting somebody go. Because that might have been the only way to get this particular person to tell you the truth — is to tell them a lie, like, ‘Your partner's already given you up,’ or ‘The evidence we found is much worse [than you think],” Hoffman says.
Officers should explain why they had to lie when writing up their reports, and they should never use scare tactics or threats of physical violence in an interrogation, he says. And any case that hinges entirely on the confession, without eyewitnesses and physical evidence also backing it up, isn’t a strong case.
Other interrogation strategies, like just keeping silent and seeing if the suspect says something incriminating, can be more effective, Hoffman says. As can taking a friendly approach, an interrogation and interview strategy he trained on at the FBI National Academy.
How Different Are Adults?
Some states bar officers from lying to minors, in recognition that youth are more likely to make false confessions. That’s because they’re more susceptible to social pressure, more likely to give in to authority, more impulsive and less likely to consider the long-term consequences of their actions, like imprisonment, over short-term benefits, like ending the interrogation.
But just because adults are less susceptible doesn’t mean they’re not susceptible at all. Per Lipper-Garabedian, “Two-thirds of all known false confessions nationwide were given by adults over the age of 18.”
Some adults can be particularly vulnerable, too, like those who are not fluent in English and those who have cognitive impairments, mental illness or are in particularly emotionally distressing situations, such as if the case involved the death of a loved one. Victor Rosario — a Massachusetts man who was ultimately exonerated after serving more than 30 years in prison — was found to have confessed after an eight-hour interrogation, during which he was delirious from alcohol withdrawal.
Will It Pass?
Rep. Lipper-Garabedian first introduced the bill last year. It didn’t move far, as just one of more than 6,000 bills filed that year, and with the judiciary committee facing a particularly heavy load. First-year bills often simply kick off conversation and education on the issue and get momentum started. This year, the bill gained a Senate co-sponsor, but legislators face a similar flood of bills and co-sponsors and say it’s too early to predict how far this measure will progress.
In addition to its measures addressing police use of deception, the bill would also require officers to create audiovisual recordings of interrogations.
Many bills, even those without any opposition, take even a decade or more to pass, says Senate co-sponsor Sen. Pat Jehlen.
Still, attention is building. The past several years have seen 10 states ban deception when interrogating youth, and a separate Senate bill introduce this year would do the same for Massachusetts.
Woody says letting police use deception could undermine people’s faith in the justice system: “A suspect who lies to police commits a crime; when police lie to a suspect in an interrogation room in a lot of states, that's just Wednesday.”
Hoffman, however, doesn’t think deception affects police-community relationships much: “I don’t think most people realize that it goes on.”
