In the article “Miranda is not the problem: Police Deception is,” Dave Kopel writes how police investigators use deceiving tactics to extract information from suspects in their custody. The police insulate their trickery tactics with the Miranda warnings. Miranda warnings have, in the past, worked as a bottleneck during the processes of extracting confessions from suspects. According to Kopel, police have been forced to circumnavigate the requirements of Miranda warnings through deceptive measures to procure confessions from suspects in their custody. I believe that it is justifiable for police to use deceptive but non-abusive techniques to obtain confessions from suspects in their lawful custody.
Using deceptive methods that are not coercive is not unethical, and it yields positive results. Kopel shows a progression of steps that police investigators use to deceive a suspect into confessing about a crime. Shealy Jr (2014) argues that that in the hunt for suspects, it is appropriate to use deception to get some suspects to confess. Lying to a suspect to prompt them to admit to a crime is not intrinsically unethical. I believe that in some situations such as homicide given that the suspect does not provide false information, the result justifies the process. Besides, the current legal rules on the acceptability of confessions are sufficient to limit the risk posed by false disclosures (Shealy Jr, 2014). However, deceptive techniques should be applied diligently and in good faith but not to falsely and knowingly implicate a suspect of an offense. Volbert et al. (2019) note that it is essential that interrogators consider the ability of a suspect to be objective, including methods used to extract a confession. However this is not to imply that use of force to procure information from a suspect is ethical. As explained by Kopel, the investigators use nonviolent methods, which include influencing suspects' psychological balance to gain critical information. I think that using upfront methods on some suspects would work against police interrogators because some of them are hard-core criminals.
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The use of non-coercive but deceptive techniques to procure confessions from some suspects is justifiable and not intrinsically unethical. Some suspects are crime hardened such that using open methods will yield insignificant outcome. Deceptive techniques allow investigators to leverage the emotional state of a suspect to gain an understanding of the latter's role in the crime at hand.
References
Shealy Jr, M. W. (2014). The hunting of man: Lies, damn lies, and police interrogations. U. Miami Race & Soc. Just. L. Rev. , 4 , 21.
Volbert, R. May, L., Hausam, J., & Lau, S. (2019). Confessions and Denials When Guilty and Innocent: Forensic Patients' Self-Reported Behavior During Police Interviews. Frontiers in psychiatry , 10 , 168. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2019.00168
