Illinois Senate Bill 2122, signed in 2021, made Illinois the first American state to bar police from using deception when interrogating a minor. Oregon, Utah, Delaware and others have since followed, and a federal bill has been introduced.
The specific practice being prohibited is the false evidence ploy: telling a suspect that fingerprints, a witness, a failed polygraph or a co-defendant's statement establishes their guilt, when none of it exists. It is lawful with adults in the United States and unlawful in England, Wales and much of Europe.
Chapters 95 through 97 are the reason for the reform. Kassin and Kiechel's experiment produced signed confessions from sixty-nine percent of participants in a sixty-second interaction with one false witness. The Central Park Five were fourteen to sixteen. Brendan Dassey was sixteen with an IQ in the low seventies, and the crucial detail was supplied to him by the investigators.
The alternative model exists, is operational at national scale, and has been evaluated.
PEACE — chapter 98 — was introduced across England and Wales in 1992 after the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six convictions were quashed. It removes the confession objective entirely: the interview is an information-gathering exercise, the interviewee gives an uninterrupted free account before any challenge, and evidence is disclosed afterwards, which is chapter 100's technique.
The empirical comparison is the argument, and it is not close. Meta-analytic work comparing information-gathering with accusatorial approaches finds that information-gathering produces more true confessions and fewer false ones. Clarke and Milne's national evaluation of PEACE found interview quality improved without a fall in admissions.
That is the case reform rests on, and it is worth stating precisely because the objection to reform is always that it is soft.
It is not soft. It is a measurement argument. An interrogation optimized for confessions is optimized for a behavior that has no reliable relationship to truth, because the pressure that produces it operates identically on the guilty and the innocent. An interview optimized for information produces more of what an investigation actually needs.
The second reform with the strongest evidence is mandatory full recording, from the beginning of the interaction rather than from the point at which a statement is taken. It is what makes chapter 97 assessable and what would have made chapter 96 impossible.
This counters Law 4.
Counters Law 4 — Ask Too Much, Then Offer Mercy