Illinois Poised to Set Taped Interrogation Rule

The governor of Illinois is expected today to sign the nation’s first law requiring that interrogations and confessions be tape recorded, a move that experts said would likely prompt other states to adopt similar rules as they seek to deter police misconduct.

The law, which will apply to homicide investigations in the state, was spurred by a series of cases in which inmates on death row were freed after evidence surfaced that they were innocent and that their confessions had been coerced.

The former commander of a Chicago police district is now the subject of a criminal investigation into accusations that suspects at his station house were tortured into confessing.

“It is our moral duty to restore the integrity of the criminal justice system as we know it today in Illinois and we must work to make it more transparent and truthful,” Gov. Rod Blagojevich said Wednesday.

“As a former prosecutor, I had some serious reservations about requiring police interviews to be taped. However, when there is a system that can allow an innocent person to be sent to death row based on a questionable confession, we have a moral obligation to intervene. The legislation I am signing requires that all homicide interrogations -- whether it’s with an adult or a juvenile -- must be electronically recorded. Simply put, this will help us ensure that confessions are valid.”

While a large police union in Chicago opposes mandatory taping, a wide array of criminal justice experts praised the new law.

“I believe it is a big step forward for law enforcement and the entire criminal justice system in Illinois,” said Chicago attorney Thomas P. Sullivan, a former U.S. attorney who co-chaired a blue-ribbon commission that examined the state’s death penalty system and recommended the taping of interrogations, among other legal changes.

“It is without a doubt the single most important step that the police ... could possibly take in pursuit of justice,” said Richard Ofshe, a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and an expert on false confessions. “Recording protects the innocent from being coerced into making false confessions and it protects the police from unjustified claims about their conduct.”

False confessions are probably the “greatest single cause of wrongful convictions,” said Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School, who has studied the problems with Illinois’ death row.

Advocates say that taping will allow judges and juries to better assess whether confessions are credible and given freely.

Michael P. Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents 17,500 active and retired officers in Chicago, said his organization opposes mandatory taping, which some in law enforcement regard as unnecessary meddling in their operations. He said a homicide investigation team, including police officers and prosecutors, should have discretion on when to tape.

But others in law enforcement, including the chief prosecutor in Chicago -- Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine -- eventually supported the measure after it was amended to allow either audio or videotaping, was limited to homicide cases and provided for limited exceptions.

The new law calls for any statement made during a homicide interrogation at a police station to be presumed inadmissible in court unless it is recorded.

Several cities, including San Diego, routinely videotape interrogations of suspects and some significant witnesses in major crimes. Los Angeles police officers tape some interrogations but are not required to do it. Earlier this year, the California Assembly passed a bill by Mervyn Dymally (D-Compton) urging law enforcement officers to videotape their interrogations.

Many law enforcement groups opposed the measure, including the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office and the Los Angeles Police Protective League, and it died in the state Senate.

State courts in Minnesota and Alaska have ordered police to tape interrogations. But the enactment of the law in Illinois is expected to lead to a major expansion of the practice.

“I think it will make a national impact,” said Richard A. Leo, associate professor of criminology at UC Irvine who is an expert on police interrogation practices.

“Taping is great for justice,” Leo said. “It creates an objective, comprehensive and reviewable record of what occurred during the interrogation. The objective record helps jurors come to more informed and hopefully more accurate decisions,” rather than having to assess credibility where an officer and a defendant present dramatically different accounts of an interrogation, Leo said.

Homicide detectives in San Diego and St. Paul, Minn., who have been taping interrogations for some time, said the practice helped law enforcement efforts.

Lt. Michael P. Hurley of the San Diego Police Department said it helps the jury to know what was said during the interrogation and to see the demeanor of the officer and a suspect.

“There is no doubt about what was said by the police officer or the suspect,” Hurley said. “There is no questioning the officer’s veracity. The other thing is it enables the jury to see if the suspect shows a lack of remorse. That can be persuasive.”

“Taping has helped us solve cases, as opposed to losing them,” said St. Paul Police Sgt. Neil P. Nelson, a 26-year-veteran, adding that if taping were no longer required in Minnesota, “I would continue to record all my interrogations. It maintains the integrity of the process and it keeps me out of court.”

Nelson said he began taping in the late 1980s when he was making mass arrests at crack houses and doing on-the-spot interviews to identify the drug seller. “I couldn’t take accurate enough notes to do a decent report, so I started tape recording in 1987 or ‘88,” he said. “So I had years under my belt when the Minnesota Supreme Court mandated taping in 1994.”

Earlier this year, Amy Klobuchar, the county attorney in Minneapolis, urged the Illinois Legislature to enact the taping law, saying the benefits outweigh the risks and costs, even though most police and prosecutors feared the consequences when the state high court ordered the taping.

“These recordings ... provide compelling evidence for prosecutors to present to juries, ensure that law enforcement follows best practices, serve as a training tool for police, and protect against false claims of coerced confessions or violations of a suspect’s constitutional rights. Perhaps most importantly, they enhance the public’s confidence in the integrity of our criminal justice system,” Klobuchar said in a letter to the Illinois Senate Judiciary subcommittee on capital litigation. Chicago attorney Sullivan said his law firm had done a study of law enforcement agencies around the country that had undertaken taping in recent years and that almost all of them found that it was working well.

But Illinois clearly needed a law because of recent history, according to Sullivan, Klobuchar and others.

Klobuchar noted that in one instance, Corothian Bell, a mildly retarded 25-year-old man, falsely confessed to killing his mother after a 50-hour interrogation. Bell said he believed he could tell the judge the truth later and win release. But he was indicted, arraigned and sent to the Cook County jail to await trial. Ultimately, DNA evidence led to the real murderer and Bell was released earlier this year after spending 17 months in jail.

Warden said a study done at Northwestern showed a clear need for the law: 25 of the 42 wrongful murder convictions documented in Illinois since 1970 involved false confessions. “We strongly suspect that the greatest single cause of wrongful convictions is false confessions,” Warden said, adding that the full extent of the problem is unknown.

Defense attorney Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York, said that Chicago had earned the dubious distinction of being “the Cooperstown of false confessions.” He said the new Illinois law represents “a huge step forward. The most important part is a recognition that false confessions are a plague that need to be remedied. The medication is the video recording of interrogations.”

Neufeld lamented that there had not been similar action taken in New York, where a Manhattan judge last year threw out the convictions of five young men who 13 years earlier confessed to attacking and brutally raping an investment banker in the Central Park jogger case. The judge acted because of new evidence pointing toward another defendant as a sole attacker who was linked to the crime by DNA. Defense lawyers and Manhattan Dist. Atty. Robert M. Morgenthau jointly asked the judge to release the inmates, even though New York Police Commissioner Raymond P. Kelly objected.

A bill was introduced in the New York Legislature late last year to require videotaping of interrogations from beginning to end, but it is still awaiting approval.

Illinois police agencies have two years to phase in the law.