Illinois to ban police from lying to underage suspects during interrogation

Illinois, earlier this week, became the first state in the United States to ban police officers from lying while question minors during an interrogation. Governor JB Pritzker signed the law, which will come into force in 2022. According to critics, the practice of lying increases the risk of false confessions being extracted and therefore miscarriage of justice takes place.

According to the new law, confessions of children and adolescents obtained “by deception” — either by presenting erroneous facts or with false promises of clemency — will no longer be admissible during trials.

“An essential tenet of good governance is recognizing the need to change the laws that have failed the people they serve,” the governor said as he signed the new law.

This reform “makes Illinois the first state in the nation to bar law enforcement from using deceptive tactics when interrogating young people,” the text of the document says.

According to media reports, it has been legal for police to lie to suspects during interrogations for decades. The practice “has led to an unacceptably high rate of false confessions among juvenile suspects,” according to a study by the New York University law school published in 2017.

The National Registry of Exonerations, which compiles records of people wrongly convicted and then cleared, estimates that 12% of the more than 2,800 cases in its database involved false confessions.

Among the most resounding cases is that of a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who were convicted of the rape and attempted murder of a jogger in Central Park in New York City in 1989, based on confessions police extracted by promising them their freedom.

The “Central Park Five” spent between six and 13 years in prison before a serial rapist admitted to assaulting the jogger and acting alone.

Talking about the reform, the Illinois Innocence Project’s legal director, Lauren Kaeseberg, dubbed the governor’s signing of the bill a “critical step in changing the trajectory of false confessions and the subsequent wrongful convictions that we have seen as a result of deceptive interrogation tactics.”

According to Kaeseberg, Illinois has long been known as the “false confession capital of the country.”