| Steven Drizin on "Should Police Interrogations be Videotaped?" |
Since false confessions may be more common than people think, many attorneys
are seeking to require videotaped interrogations. Steven Drizin, associate
professor of law at Northwestern University, says police departments
are reluctant to adopt the process.
Drizin: The interrogation is sort of the sacred cow of police work, it’s
the sort of place where many detectives earn their stripes, and it’s
an area where they do not want their tactics to be exposed to the public,
because sometimes it gets ugly during interrogations,
and they’re afraid how it will reflect on police departments in
general.
Drizin says videotaping interrogations help both the police and the defendant.
Drizin: Clearly, it’ll protect police officers
from frivolous claims of abuse. It will protect defendants from the worst
kinds of abusive tactic. It will also enable prosecutors and judges
to see whether or not the intricate details of a crime, which only the
true perpetrator would know, came from the mouth of the suspect or were
planted there by his interrogators.
Drizin says interrogation tactics are no longer a secret because of TV
shows and movies.
Drizin: The tactics that they’re afraid of revealing have already been
revealed in the arena of television. Police officers lie, they deceive
suspects about evidence, they are legally allowed to do so. It’s
not like there’s this great magical formula that they need to keep
hidden. It’s just the fear that it might cause them some embarrassment
of this information did come out, because it doesn’t look professional.
Drizin says Minnesota and Alaska have made videotaping interrogations
mandatory.
Drizin: The state supreme courts in both of those states,
frustrated at continually having to try to review confession cases without
a transcript or a tape
of the process, ordered that all interrogations of suspects be taped.
Initially there was great resistance, but as these police departments
have gotten used to videotape, they overwhelmingly endorse
taping of
interrogations and even embrace it.
Drizin believes videotaping interrogations strengthens the justice system.
Drizin: This often gets framed in terms of a soft-on-crime, versus tough-on-crime
approach which is part of the reason it gets stalled in state legislatures.
But it’s not a soft on crime approach, it’s an approach that
requires that the justice system own up to its obligation to find the
truth and nobody benefits, least of all the police, when someone is wrongfully
convicted on the basis of false confession.
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