SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Trevor Lahey knows how to play the mind games that compel suspects to confess.
The other day, he was called in to grill a man suspected of beating his 2-year-old stepdaughter raw. "I told him, I know how kids can be. They get on your nerves so much, sometimes you want to beat" them senseless, he said. "Next thing you know, he dropped his head and confessed."
A sheriff's deputy in rural Morgan County, Lahey has learned to treat the most repellent criminals like buddies. He talks to them as if he knows what it's like to smack the wife or pin the girl down for sex, because after all, she wanted it, didn't she, pal? The tactic works. But Lahey is feeling pressure to find a strategy that's "more politically correct," as he puts it. Because soon, many of his interrogations will be recorded, start to finish.
For the first time, what he says in that cramped interview room will be scrutinized as much as the suspect's response. "That scares me a little," Lahey said.
Stung by allegations of police brutality and coerced confessions, Illinois will require all law enforcement officers to record their interrogations in homicide cases starting in summer 2005. All interrogations of juvenile suspects must also be recorded on video- or audiotape.
Minnesota and Alaska have had similar policies for years, and taping mandates are now under consideration in Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and New Jersey. The California Assembly last year approved a bill encouraging videotaped interrogations; it did not pass the Senate. As momentum for the concept builds, more than a dozen law-enforcement agencies -- from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Prince George's County, Md. -- have decided not to wait for statewide requirements, but to begin recording interrogations in their most serious felony cases.
Proponents insist that detectives have nothing to worry about: If they're doing everything by the book, why should they care if a hidden camera records them?
But to many investigators, the camera fundamentally changes the dynamics of an interrogation. Officers are used to conducting interviews in private, or perhaps with a partner, then summarizing the tense hours of back-and-forth in a few curt paragraphs. With a camera rolling, the windowless interview room is suddenly open to the world.
Investigators must consider how their tactics will play before a jury. And how a defense lawyer might pick apart their words.
