WASHINGTON — Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill Thursday making Illinois the first state to ban law enforcement officers from lying to minors during interrogations -- a practice that adds significantly to the risk of false confessions and wrongful convictions.
If someone in law enforcement "knowingly engages in deception" during an interrogation, statements from the youth suspect would be inadmissible in court, according to the bill, which takes effect at the start of next year.
Terrill Swift had his conviction vacated in 2011 after serving more than 15 years in prison based on a false confession to a crime he didn't commit. He spoke at Thursday's bill signing and explained that he believed the new law could have saved him.
"This bill, I truly believe, could have saved my life," Swift said. "When it was first brought to me, it touched me in that sense, that it could have saved my life. But the reality is, I can't get what I got back. So moving forward I want to try and help make sure that this doesn't happen again."
The original sponsors, Illinois state Senator Robert Peters and state Representative Justin Slaughter, garnered bipartisan support for the bill that culminated in a near-unanimous vote to pass it in both houses. House Minority Leader Jim Durkin, a Republican and former Chicago prosecutor, joined as a co-sponsor and helped propel the bill’s passage.
“I’ll never be accused of being soft on crime, but I’m more interested in seeking the truth than a conviction,” Durkin said. “I believe in fair play. We should never tolerate, under any circumstance, the use of deception to seek a statement or an admission by any defendant, let alone a juvenile.”
Though few Americans realize it, police regularly deceive suspects during questioning to try to secure confessions, from saying DNA placed them at the scene of a crime to claiming eyewitnesses identified them as being the perpetrator. Detectives also can lie about the consequences of confessing, saying, for instance, that admitting responsibility is a quick ticket home.
Minors -- who have been found to be two to three times more likely to confess to crimes they didn’t commit -- are especially vulnerable to such pressure tactics, said Laura Nirider, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, who consulted on the bill together with the national Innocence Project and the Illinois Innocence Project.
Though it is currently legal for police in all 50 states to lie during interrogations, Oregon and New York are considering similar legislation, said Rebecca Brown, policy director at the national Innocence Project.
A bill still pending in New York would apply to adults as well as minors. There, deceptive interrogation techniques have contributed to several infamous juvenile wrongful convictions, including 15-year-old Yusef Salaam of the so-called Central Park Five, now also known as the Exonerated Five. The five Black and Latino teens were coerced into confessing to a rape they didn’t commit in 1989 and served prison time before being exonerated in 2002.
Illinois has in recent years uncovered at least 100 wrongful convictions predicated on false confessions, 31 of them involving people under 18 years of age.
Senate Bill 2122 was supported not only by individuals who themselves falsely confessed to crimes, but also by the state’s Chiefs of Police, the Illinois State’s Attorneys’ Association, and the Office of Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.
“The history of false confessions in Illinois can never be erased, but this legislation is a critical step to ensuring that history is never repeated,” Foxx said in a press release. “I hope this is a start to rebuilding confidence and trust in a system that has done harm to so many people for far too long.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
