One Lie Can Destroy a Life

More than half of the cases where innocent people were wrongfully prosecuted and imprisoned over the last three decades involved misconduct by the police and prosecutors. A news report by the national registry of exonerations released in September of 2020 compiled data on exonerations since 1989. Exoneration is defined as a person who is convicted of a crime and is officially completely cleared based on new evidence of innocence. 54% of the 2,400 cases analyzed were the result of misconduct by law enforcement and prosecutors. Severity of the charged crime played a role in the misconduct. Misconduct is defined as a violation of an official duty in the investigation or prosecution of a criminal case. Misconduct was broken down into five categories; witness tampering, interrogations, fabricated evidence, conceal evidence, and misconduct at trial. Disturbingly, the report said that almost 80% of death penalty cases that were exonerated involved official misconduct, where 8 out of 10 people who are wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die were put on death row because of police and prosecutorial misconduct. While black males make up only 13% of this country, 52% of wrongful murder convictions involved black males. 

First, deceptive interrogation tactics frequently induce false confessions which are the leading cause to wrongful convictions in the United States. Research shows that testimonial lies, such as perjury in court and falsifying police reports, are commonly employed by officers to secure convictions and circumvent constitutional protections. Such practices remain illegal, but are rarely identified or punished. Testimonial lies and the pervasiveness of police deception undermines the integrity and legitimacy of the criminal Justice system. It leads to wrongful convictions, weakened civil liberties, and erodes public trust in law enforcement. 

Officers learn deceptive techniques from interrogation manuals and since the Supreme Court has put few limits on the practice, this promotes an unduly permissive attitude towards deceitful behavior that carries over to perjury in court, lying on warrant applications, and falsifying police reports. Testimonial line subverts justice by creating a false record meant to deceive authorities and courts with one goal in mind, achieving criminal convictions. Research shows that testimonial lies told by police are commonplace, routinely used to circumvent constitutional protections, and rarely punished due to systemic biases and close relationships between prosecutors, judges, and police. Ultimately, unless presented with clear evidence of coercion or torture, courts rarely find deceptive police practices unconstitutional in getting a false confession or conviction. 

Unlike American law, which has practically sanctioned the practice, English law has ensured that deceptive interrogation techniques are rarely used against suspects. In most developed countries including England, France, Germany, Spain, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, and all of Scandinavia, police are generally not permitted to deceive suspects. The United Kingdom regulates interrogations through the police and criminal evidence act of 1984 (P.A.C.E.). P.A.C.E. emphasizes openness, transparency, and accountability, it focuses on building rapport through exploratory open-ended questions to gather information and uncover evidence of guilt or innocence. Their goal is to find the truth, not induced confessions. In Germany officers are expected to take on a more neutral role during pretrial investigation. Their duty is to uncover exculpatory and incriminating evidence in an unbiased fashion. All forms of deception, I turned the law defines very broadly our entirely banned during interrogation. Recent analysis suggest that the P.A.C.E. model has led other countries, including New Zealand and Norway, to adopt it as national policy. 

Testimonial lies represent falsification of the factual record in a legal proceeding. Police lies are deemed unacceptable - indeed illegal - yet are arguably just as prevalent in American policing. Testimonial line is widespread across various contexts; Court testimony, warrant applications, and written reports - often to circumvent constitutional safeguards. Perjury is so commonplace that some have invented a name for it, “testilying.” Judge Alex Kozinski stated “It is an open secret long shared by prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges that perjury is widespread among law enforcement officers.” former US attorney and New York judge Irving Younger echoed the sentiment, noting “Every lawyer who practices in the criminal courts knows that police perjury is commonplace.” 1994 report of New York's Mollen Commission found that police falsification, which includes testimonial perjury, documentary perjury, and falsification of police records, was one of the most common forms of police corruption within the criminal justice system. Joseph Grano spent years working in a Philadelphia prosecutor's office and found that officers demonstrated an open willingness to change facts preparing to testify at suppression hearings by lying about consent, probable cause, or interrogating suspects and then providing false testimony to legitimize their unconstitutional acts after the fact. 

From prosecutors to judges to other police officers, key actors within the criminal justice system often overlook this troubling phenomenon due to either incentives or bias. A code of silence among law enforcement impedes investigations and prosecutors are reluctant to press charges. Police perjury goes largely unchecked, consequently police perjury generates a perception among police that they can lie in court with impunity. Prosecutors often ignore police perjury because of the symbiotic relationship with the police and the success of their careers often hinges upon maintaining good relations with the police. Perjury is a crime and like all illegal conduct, can be sufficiently deterred only through punishment. Without a private right of action for the victims of testilying, police perjury can be deterred only by internal departmental sanctions and criminal prosecutions. By committing perjury officers take it upon themselves to unilaterally determine the limits of constitutional protections. They seize the privilege to decide when the Constitution protects and to what extent. 

One lie can destroy a life, an officers' words exert significant influence in determining the course of legal proceedings. And officers' false narrative events can infect the prosecutor's, judge's, and jury’s understanding of facts. Thus an officer's perjured testimony can result in a wrongful conviction. In a system whose purpose should be to uncover the truth, it is socially destructive to allow law enforcement officers to ascertain Truth by defaulting to lie and deception. Allowing as much undermines the integrity of not only law enforcement agencies but the criminal justice system that enables it.