Ted Bradford says the worst day of his life was when detectives took him into a tiny room to question him about a rape.
“The whole day it was like accusation after accusation,” he says. “I kept telling them over and over, ‘I didn't do this.’”
Bradford says the officers in Yakima, Wash., claimed they had biological evidence that would prove he did it, and they weren't going to let him leave until he admitted it.
“I knew I didn’t do it,” he said. “So I'm thinking, ‘In order to get out of this situation, I could just give them a statement. They’ll test that evidence. It’ll show that I didn’t do it, and then this will all be done 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. This was the late nineties and the technology wasn’t there yet.
Bradford recanted his confession, but was convicted anyway. He was 22 with two small children when he went to prison.
“Every day I woke up and knew that I shouldn't be there,” he says.
Advancements in DNA testing helped lead to his exoneration in 2010.
What happened to Bradford might seem extreme, but nearly 30 years later, the tactic used on him is not. In every state, police officers are allowed to lie to adults during an interrogation. The hope, in many cases, is that they’ll get a person to confess to committing a crime.
When it comes to children and teenagers, a growing number of states are stopping that practice: Ten have passed laws in recent years effectively banning police from lying to juveniles during interrogations, starting with Illinois in 2021. But some legal advocates are pushing for a deception ban that would apply to everyone, not just kids.
‘A quick and relatively straightforward way to close a case’
Deception is a powerful law enforcement tool in eliciting confessions, says wrongful convictions attorney Laura Nirider.
“Police are trained around the country in all 50 states to use deception during interrogation, to lie both about the evidence against a suspect and to lie about the consequences of confessing in order to make it seem not so bad if you just say that you did these things,” she says.
Police can go into an interrogation room with a suspect, Nirider says, and emerge with “one of the most believable pieces of evidence imaginable, a confession.”
“It's a quick and relatively straightforward way to close a case,” she says.
But Nirider says using deception can also draw 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 involved a false confession.
Legal experts say the deception 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 that all of us are vulnerable to.”
‘Law enforcement is the biggest impediment’
In Washington state, where Bradford was convicted, Democratic lawmakers want to set a higher bar: A bill that would make incriminating statements made in police custody – by adults or children – largely inadmissible in court if obtained using deception.
State Rep. Strom Peterson has introduced the bill twice, but it hasn’t gone anywhere.
“Law enforcement is the biggest impediment to the bill. They believe that the system in which they work is effective,” he says.
The Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs declined NPR’s request for an interview, but said in a statement that it opposes such a measure, because banning deception would take away a tactic that yields “many more true confessions” than false ones.
“We fear that it will negatively impact our ability to solve crimes and would result in less accountability for those who victimize others,” the association’s policy director, James McMahan, said at a hearing for the bill in February.
“Criminals often conduct elaborate stories to conceal their crimes,” McMahan said at the hearing. “Sometimes the use of deception is required to locate the truth both to convict and to exonerate people. Such deceptions include telling a person that abuse was discovered during a routine medical exam rather than 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 a lot of weight. Research indicates that people who confess are treated differently afterwards: They’re more likely to be charged, face more charges, and receive a harsher punishment when convicted.
“A confession will trump everything,” says Jim Trainum, a retired homicide detective in Washington, D.C.
In his experience, there is pressure to move on after a suspect confesses because a detective’s measure of success is often tied to closure rates.
“Let's say that I get a confession and I get all the stuff that I want to go out and corroborate. I want to make sure that this is an accurate confession,” Trainum says. “I'm sitting there at my desk working very, very hard on it. And my sergeant comes up and says, ‘What are you doing? That's a confession. That's closed. Move on. You got other ones to take care of.’”
‘Trying to give the police new tools’
Those against deception bans see them as an attack on police, says Mark Fallon, a consultant on interrogation practices and former federal agent. In fact, he says, it’s the opposite.
“It is actually trying to give the police new tools, better tools,” he says.
There’s another way for police to question people, Fallon says, that relies on building rapport and asking open-ended questions, and where the primary goal is information, rather than a confession.
That technique is used in other countries, including much of Europe. In England, France, Germany, Australia, Japan and elsewhere, for instance, the police are generally not allowed to deceive suspects.
Trainum says interrogation methods that don’t rely on deception ultimately make the police more trustworthy to communities.
“Today’s suspect is tomorrow's witness,” he says.
When a suspect or witness has been lied to, he says, “that radiates out. And no wonder people don't trust us. Why should they trust us?”
That is why Peterson, the lawmaker, plans to introduce the bill in Washington again. He says the public is better off when police use the best tools available to convict the right people.
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