The governor of Illinois has signed the country’s first law prohibiting police from lying to juveniles during criminal interrogations.
The measure, which is intended to reduce false confessions by young people, was one of four pieces of legislation JB Pritzker, a Democrat, signed, he said, “to change the laws that have failed the people they serve”.
The state senator Robert Peters and state representative Justin Slaughter, both Chicago Democrats, sponsored the bill.
It bans detectives from using deceptive practices when questioning minors in criminal investigations. Experts say young people are far more likely than adults to offer false confessions.
It takes effect on 1 January, along with another plan allowing a county prosecutor to seek re-sentencing for an offender if the original sentence “no longer advances the interests of justice”.
Having an immediate effect, however, is a law requiring a study of ways to reduce the state’s prison population through similar re-sentencing action and a law that allows offenders to participate in so-called restorative justice programs, in which offenders reconcile with victims.
It encourages participation by precluding offenders’ statements from being used against them in future proceedings.
Interrogation tactics such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists are commonly used by investigators and will be banned for suspects under 18.
Such interrogation methods can demonstrably lead to false confessions and have been a factor in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA, the Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people, said and NPR reported.
Illinois once was called the “false confession capital of the United States”, the organization said, because of a number of high-profile exonerations of people who falsely confessed to crimes they had not committed.
“In Illinois alone, there have been 100 wrongful convictions predicated on false confessions, including 31 involving people under 18 years of age,” Lauren Kaeseberg, legal director at the Illinois Innocence Project, told NPR.
The project has cited cases in which false confessions given by teens led to incarceration for decades before convictions were overturned when new evidence emerged.
