From [HERE] Most Americans understand that the police are allowed to lie to suspects. Whether learned from watching procedurals, news reports or personal experience, it is generally recognized that deceit during suspect interrogations is a routine feature of American policing.  

What is less understood are the consequences of accepting such practices, and the extent to which the U.S. stands as an outlier in sanctioning them.  

To elicit confessions, police routinely employ a variety of manipulative practices, including lying about the existence of incriminating evidence or falsely implying leniency in exchange for cooperation. These techniques are not tools of a last resort, but core components of interrogation in the U.S. They are taught in some of the most influential police manuals, tolerated by judges and widely accepted as standard practice. 

Defenders of these practices are quick to point out that police have tough cases on their hands and must use all methods at their disposal to find the truth. Undoubtedly, deception is an effective technique at times for eliciting confessions from criminals and solving crimes in some cases.  

Yet these techniques also have costs. Despite potential investigative advantages, the prevalence of deception has had severe social consequences, not only for the innocent people subjected to such practices, but also for the integrity of the criminal justice system. 

First, the use of deceptive interrogation techniques significantly increases the risk of false confessions. The psychological pressure and manipulation inherent in deceptive interrogation tactics can induce even an innocent suspect to admit to a crime. When faced with repeated assertions that incontrovertible evidence exists to secure a conviction — say a DNA test — some suspects begin to doubt their own recollections. Others make a calculated decision that the officers’ minds are made up and confessing is in their best interest.

One study of police detectives estimated that roughly 1 in 20 innocent suspects provides a false confession during interrogation — a staggering number, considering how many interrogations that occur daily.

Unfortunately, once elicited, false confessions are difficult to overcome in court, even in the face of contradictory evidence. As a result, false confessions routinely result in convictions, and indeed, are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions in the United States. Of the hundreds of wrongful convictions overturned by the Innocence Project, 29 percent involved false confessions. For capital cases, that figure is 61 percent. [MORE]