Law Enforcement Coercive Methods

Obtaining a confession from a suspect presents an arduous task for law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies. Because of difficulties that may arise in this attempt, the use of coercive techniques to receive information from the detainee may be necessary. Some will argue that these methods are superfluous, but using coercive methods that do not cause physical harm should be used. To avoid physical or psychological torture, the law does allow for coercive techniques. According to the Innocent Project 1 out of 4 people are wrongfully convicted but later exonerated by DNA evidence made a false confession or incriminating statement (Costanzo & Gerrity 2009). If law enforcement relied on physical or psychological tactics to gain information,
Now imagine if you were being physically or psychologically broken down; could you withstand from disclosing information? I highly doubt it. Confronted with excruciating pain, people will tell you what they know. However, the “truthful” information is construed with incomplete or mixed with false information to appease the torturer. Because interrogators are not all-knowing, they couldn’t tell which bits of information were true and which were false. Thus, this leads to the interrogator inflicting more pain on the victim (Costanzo & Gerrity 2009). Many survivors of torture reported that they would have said anything for the torture to stop. This information of course is all speculation, because torture-based interrogation are usually conducted in secret. There is no direct research on the relationship between torture and false confession. Even though there is no correlation between torture and false confession, it should still be used in certain situations. If the suspect is known to be part of a terrorist organization and has vital information on a plot to harm innocent people, it should be used to the fullest extent. If we do not have hard evidence that the suspect is involved with committing future actions, it should be avoided. If interrogation is in-acted without evidence to support this claim it could lead to another Maher Arar situation. He was a Canadian citizen who was taken by U.S. officials in Kennedy
In the civilian criminal justice field there is evidence to show that coercive techniques that are less severe than torture still lead to false confessions. DNA analysis of innocent wrongly convicted criminals show that false confessions are a major problem in wrongful convictions, accounting for 24% to be correct (Costanzo & Gerrity 2009). A study conducted by Drizin and Leo identified 125 false confessions over a thirty year period. This study did not include un-proven false confessions, meaning the number of false confessions over this time period are much higher. It goes to show the higher of coercion used by law enforcement increases the likelihood of a false confession. Even with the hard data on false confessions, I still believe these tactics should be used in interrogating suspects. Because the Innocence Project have proven techniques to reduce the number of false confessions in using coercive