Legal Commentary

CT Considers Bill to Exclude Unrecorded Confessions

By TChris

A police procedural reform, long advocated by TalkLeft and by a variety of organizations and concerned citizens who want to reduce the risk of mistaken accusations and convictions, continues to gain steam. The Judiciary Committee of Connecticut's General Assembly is considering a bill that would render confessions obtained in a custodial interrogation presumptively inadmissible as evidence unless the interrogation has been electronically recorded. The bill should gain support in light of a court decision that granted a new trial to a mentally disabled man whose unrecorded confession became the most powerful evidence in a murder prosecution that lacked physical evidence tying the man to the crime.

In the 1992 trial, there was no expert witness to explain the manipulative methods that detectives use to wheedle confessions. [Richard] Lapointe's attorneys were overly confident that the jurors would acquit after seeing him on the witness stand revealing his vulnerability to suggestion and his child-like desire to please authority figures.

TalkLeft wrote about the Lapointe case here. [more ...]

Mandating recorded interrogations -- particularly in a custodial setting (a police department interrogation room or a jail cell, for instance) -- is a no-brainer.

Yet for a dozen years, the resistance to recording legislation ("Don't tell us how to do our job!") has been ferocious. Our top cops and prosecutors have used every argument to block this entirely beneficial reform. Convictions of the guilty are made more certain. The innocent are protected. The savings in court costs are immense. And every major study of police experience with recording says it is a law enforcement tool enthusiastically embraced once police try it.

If trials are a search for the truth (as prosecutors like to proclaim in their arguments to the jury), why should we conceal the truth about the tactics that a police detective used to obtain a confession?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on March 31, 2009 (boomark / email).