Recent advances in DNA technology have uncovered astonishing numbers of wrongful convictions involving people who confessed to crimes they did not commit.
From high-profile exonerations, such as the Central Park Five, to cases more obscure, it is now clear that certain police interrogation practices can lead innocent people to confess — and that judges and juries tend to believe these confessions.
To prevent this tragic source of injustice, a number of scholars have proposed that police be required to video record all interrogations — the entire process, not just the final confession.
As stated in a White Paper published by APA's Division 41: "Without equivocation, our most essential recommendation is to lift the veil of secrecy from the interrogation process in favor of the principle of transparency" (Kassin et al., 2010, p. 25).
At present, half of all states as well as federal agencies require the full recording of custodial interrogations; other states do not. This split betrays a history of heated debate on the matter.
On the one hand, APA and other professional organizations have favored mandatory recording in the hope that it will deter police from using egregious interrogation tactics, inhibit frivolous defense claims of coercion, and make judges and juries more accurate fact finders of confession evidence.
Yet others have opposed recording either on pragmatic grounds (e.g., financial costs) or the claim that it will inhibit suspects and adversely affect the confession-taking process.
In their recent article in Law and Human Behavior, Kassin and colleagues (2019) observed real suspects caught up in real investigations to test the hypothesis that recording will alter a suspect's behavior and decision-making.
With cooperation from a small city police department, a unique opportunity presented itself. Consistent with statewide practice, this department routinely records its interrogations but is not required to inform suspects that they are doing so. This combination of practices enabled the first fully randomized field experiment of police interrogations.
With 122 crime suspects brought into custody for questioning, police detectives randomly informed some but not others that their session would be recorded by a concealed camera (cases involving juveniles, homicides, and drug crimes were a priori excluded from the sample). The authors later transcribed, de-identified, and coded these recordings, allowing them to compare the two groups on a range of measures objective and subjective measures.
Results showed that suspects exhibited little awareness or concern about the presence of a camera; not a single informed suspect refused or expressed a reluctance to proceed because they were being recorded.
Between-group comparisons further showed that camera-informed suspects spoke as often and as much as those who were not informed; their sessions lasted just as long; they were as likely to waive Miranda rights at the outset and later; they were as likely to make admissions and confessions, not just denials; their statements contained similar amounts of detail; and they were perceived no differently by detectives on a range of dimensions (e.g., cooperative, anxious, talkative, truthful, self-conscious).
In tracking these cases 14 months later, the authors observed no differences in the rate at which the two groups were ultimately convicted or acquitted.
Of relevance to policy and practice, this study did not support the hypothesis that recording — even when transparent, as required in two-party consent states — adversely affects suspects, the process, or case dispositions.
While more research is needed to test the generalizability of these findings, the results offer no empirical basis for citing suspect inhibition as a reason to oppose a policy of recording interrogations.
Citation
- Kassin, S. M., Russano, M. B., Amrom, A. D., Hellgren, J., Kukucka, J., & Lawson, V. Z. (2019). Does video recording inhibit crime suspects? Evidence from a fully randomized field experiment. Law and Human Behavior, 43(1), 45–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lhb0000319
Note: This article is in the Forensic Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Forensic Psychology topic area.