Watching one of the trial documentaries they showed interrogation footage where to encourage the suspect to confess the police officer makes such threats as his wife going to jail, so that then his kids will have to go into foster care where they will be molested and his nice house and car will be lost etc. They actually get the guy crying.
So what is the limit here? A cop during interrogation can threaten to shoot your husband and rape your children before bashing in their heads and gain a valid confession? Seems like as long as you find the right threats it would work 99% of the time.
If the cop can’t directly threaten well as the officer demonstrated it seems rather simple to be a little sly about it.
There are limits, of course, but cops pretty much know where that line is and don’t often cross over it. Lying is pretty much SOP to extract information from a prisoner. Threats would be more of the suggestions of penalty than of the physical harm nature.
When I was kid the police came to my door and arrested me. Unbeknownst to me they also arrested a friend that I had been playing basketball with earlier. It seems some old lady heard a basketball bounding near the time of a store window breaking. Police told both of us separately that the other had confessed saying the other one broke the window. Apparently someone did break a window along the street where we had walked by much earlier. My friend’s grandma was a probate court judge. She stepped in and this charade was over within hours. It may be slightly harder these days of recorded confessions and so forth. I’m sure the police still have their ways to cajole and threaten “people of interest.”
Telling someone that another suspect has confessed and implicated you is a long long way from saying there are “no limits”.
Also, there is no general requirement to record interrogations or confessions, which might indeed reduce coerced confessions. I hope some day this does indeed become a universal standard – with the decreasing costs of recording technology, it should be.
Threats may or may not be another form of lie. And they might be entirely truthful ans still completely legitimate. Explaining a worst-case scenario may sound horrible and may in actuality be both threatening and true. And there is the opposite, the reassuring lie about how everything will be easily solved if you just confess to this thing, which after all is a very minor offence.
There is a concept called a “coerced confession”. Sometimes that involves beating a confession out of a suspect, but I’d guess there are lesser examples. For instance, if a police office put a gun to your head and says, “Sign this confession or I’ll shoot”, I’m sure the confession would be thrown out *if a judge could be convinced that the defendant’s claim of coercion was actually true. * Likewise, to tell a suspect that they don’t have a right to an attorney – essentially lying about your Miranda rights – would likely get a confession thrown out. But again, they problem is convincing someone later the the lie happened if there is no other evidence to back it up than the claim of the suspect.
They can lie about facts, but they cannot lie about legal advice. For example, they can’t say that if you sign this confession, we will give you immunity. Or that we will make sure that you don’t do jail time.
But they can say stuff like, “It will work better for you if you cooperate.” That’s considered puffery.
