Ted Bradford says the worst day of his life was when detectives took him into a small room to question him about a rape.

“All day it was like accusation after accusation,” he says. “I kept telling them over and over, ‘I didn’t do that.'”

Bradford says officers in Yakima, Washington, they claimed to have biological evidence that would prove he did, and they weren’t going to let him go until he confessed.

“I knew I didn’t,” he said. “So I’m thinking, ‘To get out of this situation, I could give them a statement. They will test that evidence. It will show that I didn’t do it and then it will be over with.”

After hours of questioning, Bradford confessed to the crime. But the evidence police had – a mask left at the scene – could not be DNA tested. It was the late nineties and the technology didn’t exist yet.

Bradford recanted his confession, but was convicted anyway. She was 22 years old with two young children when she went to prison.

“Every day I woke up and knew I wasn’t supposed to be there,” he says.

Advances in DNA testing contributed to his exoneration in 2010.

What happened to Bradford might seem extreme, but almost 30 years later, the tactics used on him are not. In every state, police officers are allowed to lie to adults during an interrogation. The hope, in many cases, is that they will get a person to confess to committing a crime.

When it comes to children and teens, a growing number of states are cracking down on the practice: Ten have passed laws in recent years effectively banning police from lying to minors during interrogations, starting with Illinois in 2021. But some legal advocates are pushing for a deception. ban that would apply to everyone, not just children.

“A quick and relatively simple way to close a case”

Deception is a powerful law enforcement tool in obtaining confessions, says wrongful conviction attorney Laura Nirider.

“Police are trained across the country in all 50 states to use deception during interrogation, to lie about both the evidence against a suspect and the consequences of confessing, to make it seem not so bad if you just say you did. these things,” she says.

Police can walk into an interrogation room with a suspect, Nirider says, and come out with “one of the most credible pieces of evidence imaginable, a confession.”

“It’s a quick and relatively simple way to close a case,” she says.

But Nirider says the use of deception can also attract false confessions.

According to the Innocence Project, a national organization that works to overturn wrongful convictions, nearly a third of DNA exonerations from 1989 to 2020 involves a false confession.

Legal experts say the cheating bans passed in recent years fail to protect other vulnerable groups: young adults, people with intellectual disabilities, even just people who are naturally compliant.

“Children are one category that makes you more vulnerable, but it’s certainly not the only category,” says Lara Zarowsky, executive and policy director at the Washington Innocence Project. “It’s something we’re all vulnerable to.”

“Law enforcement is the biggest impediment”

In Washington state, where Bradford was convicted, Democratic lawmakers want to set a higher standard: a bill that would make incriminating statements made in police custody — by adults or children — largely inadmissible in court if obtained through deception.

State Rep. Strom Peterson introduced the bill twice, but it went nowhere.

“Enforcement is the biggest impediment to the bill. They believe the system they work in is efficient,” he says.

The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police declined NPR’s request for an interview, but said in a statement it opposes such a measure because banning deception would eliminate a tactic that yields “far more true confessions” than false ones .

“We fear it will negatively impact our ability to solve crimes and result in less accountability for those who victimize others,” the association’s policy director, James McMahan, said at a hearing for the February invoice.

“Offenders often spin elaborate stories to hide their crimes,” McMahan told the hearing. “Sometimes the use of deception is necessary to locate the truth both to convict and to free people. Such deceptions include telling a person that the abuse was discovered during a routine medical exam, rather than being reported by a family member.”

In its statement, the association added that judges assess whether confessions are given voluntarily before they can be introduced as evidence, and convictions based solely on confessions are rare.

Even with other evidence, however, confessions carry great weight. Research indicates that people who confess are treated differently after that: they are more likely to be charged, face more charges, and receive a harsher sentence when convicted.

“A confession will conquer all,” says Jim Trainum, a retired homicide detective in Washington, DC

In his experience, there is pressure to move on after a suspect confesses because the measure of a detective’s success is often tied to closure rates.

“Let’s say I get a confession and I get all the things I want to get out and corroborate. I want to make sure this is an accurate confession,” says Trainum. “I’m sitting there at my desk working really, really hard on it. And my sergeant comes over and says, “What are you doing? This is a confession. This is closed. Go ahead. You have others to take care of.”

“Trying to give police new tools”

Those who oppose deception bans see them as an attack on the police, says Mark Fallon, a consultant on interrogation practices and a former federal agent. In fact, he says, it’s the other way around.

“They’re actually trying to give the police new tools, better tools,” he says.

There’s another way police can question people, Fallon says, which relies on building rapport and asking open-ended questions, with the main goal being information rather than a confession.

This technique is used in other countries, including much of Europe. In England, France, Germany, Australia, Japan and elsewhere, for example, the police are generally it is not allowed to deceive the suspects.

Trainum says interrogation methods that don’t rely on deception make the police more trustworthy for communities.

“Today’s suspect is tomorrow’s witness,” he says.

When a suspect or witness has been lied to, he says, “it radiates. And no wonder people don’t trust us. Why should they trust us?”

That’s why Peterson, the lawmaker, plans to reintroduce the bill in Washington. He says the audience is better when the police use the best tools available to convict the right people.

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