“Your sister’s blood was found in your bedroom.”
“Your dad woke up from his coma and said you did this.”
“You failed the polygraph.”
“You could be facing the death penalty.”
“Your friend is down the hall pinning it all on you.”
All of the above sentences are lies that helped prompt young people to falsely confess to crimes. Did you know that police are allowed to lie to suspects in interrogations? Yes, even to young people who the law says are not yet old enough to buy cigarettes or alcohol, vote, or drive a car.
When I tell people this fact, their eyes usually widen and their jaws drop open. Most people don’t know that, years ago, the US Supreme Court sanctioned the use of deception in police interrogations. Also, most people don’t know about — or grasp — the psychological processes of persuasion and social influence that are typically involved in real-world interrogations. But I do, after spending the last decade or so researching and testifying on this topic, and two decades more generally studying children’s involvement in the legal system.
For most of history, police interrogations have been shrouded in secrecy. Recently, though, popular docuseries have highlighted cases such as Brendan Dassey's, Making a Murderer, and the Central Park Five, now known as the Exonerated Five, When They See Us, and struck chords with millions of people watching at home.
These series and others have shed public light on what many psychologists and legal scholars have studied extensively for decades: Police officers in the US can use deceptive, manipulative, and potentially coercive interrogation tactics with even the most vulnerable young people. These tactics include outright lies about evidence implicating the suspect (often called the “false evidence ploy”; “We have you on CCTV footage at the scene”), bluffing about evidence that exists but does not yet implicate the suspect (“There’s CCTV footage of the scene — we’re combing through it now”), or implying, but not explicitly promising, leniency in exchange for a confession. It is a policy at odds with more than a century of developmental science.
Undisputably, children and teens are different from adults in several critical ways, which have long justified their different treatment in the legal system. For example, youth have reasoning abilities that are still developing, are especially vulnerable in emotional or stressful situations, are more susceptible to social influence, and have greater difficulty evaluating reward and risk. Developmentally, children and teens are less able to regulate emotions and are more impulsive, tend to make immature decisions, and are more suggestible and obedient to authority than adults.
No offense to young readers — your powerful, intentional voices and actions can and do change the world for the better — but your brains aren’t fully developed yet. It can be harder for you to make decisions that pit long-term consequences (like being convicted of a crime months or years later at trial) against short-term gain (like ending a stressful questioning process). This is the case especially in time-pressured, emotionally provocative contexts such as a police interrogation. In fact, it’s clear from research that important changes in the brain that impact behavior and decision making are still happening into your early- to mid-20s.
These fundamental differences are behind multiple important legal decisions like banning the death penalty and mandatory life without parole sentences for youth. The many psychological and neuroscientific studies that demonstrate key differences between youth and adults would also seem to justify different treatment of young people during police interrogations, and yet there are shockingly few protections for youth across US interrogation rooms. Research, including my own, reveals that young people are exposed to the same types of interrogation techniques that adults undergo.
It is also undisputed that simply being a child or teen, and all of the above developmental characteristics and limitations that go with these stages of life, is a well-established risk factor for false confession. So is the use of deceptive, manipulative interrogation tactics, regardless of the suspect's age.
Lies about evidence are a common factor in known false confession cases, as is “minimization,” a word that refers to a variety of tactics involving police implying that lenient treatment will follow a confession. Additionally, laboratory research shows that teens (and adults, for that matter) are more likely to take responsibility for a wrongdoing they haven’t committed when false evidence is presented to them.
False confessions have contributed to a substantial percentage of known wrongful convictions, and youth are overrepresented among exonerations involving false confessions. No one can argue with the tragedy that is a young person behind bars for a crime they didn’t commit, their youth and future stolen from them. Such devastating miscarriages of justice tear families apart, fail to achieve justice for victims, and leave the real perpetrators on the streets to re-offend. But this is not the only potential consequence of relying on ethically questionable interrogation practices.
Law enforcement's use of deceptive, manipulative, and potentially coercive interrogation tactics may also promote negative attitudes toward the police and undermine public confidence in the justice system. For example, in our research, we interviewed almost two hundred 14- to 17-year-olds who were incarcerated for serious offenses in California. Teens who reported experiencing more high-pressure interrogations had more negative perceptions of the police.
This study was correlational, meaning that we examined links or associations between teens’ past interrogation experiences and their perceptions of the police. We can’t draw causal conclusions from this type of study design; that is, we can’t say that their reported interrogation experiences necessarily caused them to hold more negative views of the police (click here for hilarious and very real correlations that I always share with students when discussing why it's important to understand the correlation vs. causation distinction). But it is important to consider how the fact that police are allowed to outright lie to children and teens may play out in the minds of the public and influence young, developing attitudes of fairness and justice during a key developmental period of life.
Many people have their first contact with police in their teen years. Adolescence is, after all, a developmental stage that is associated with an increase in risky and delinquent behavior and, for many teens across the country, regular monitoring of behavior by police presence in schools. These early experiences may have long-lasting effects, potentially influencing later attitudes and behaviors. Changing how police interrogate children and teens will do more than protect vulnerable young people and help prevent wrongful convictions; a more developmentally oriented approach — starting with taking deception off the table — may also promote better police-community relations.
Fortunately, there are some legislative changes afoot. Since 2021, a handful of US states (including Illinois, Oregon, Utah, California) have banned the use of deception in interrogations of juvenile suspects. Several other states have such legislation or other protective legislation for youth (and adults, too, in some states) in the works (Michigan and New York). But more can and should be done to safeguard the legal rights of the approximately 700,000 youth under the age of 18 arrested in the US each year.
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