DOJ Opposed Confession Cameras To Hide Interrogation Techniques

One of the now-famous fired prosecutors, Arizona's U.S. attorney Paul Charlton, got into a spat with Justice Department officials since he wanted to videotape interrogations in order to secure more convictions. Current Justice Department policy bans videotaping of interrogations and prosecutors must rely on agent's notes and recollections in court cases.

Now, thanks to a dump of documents from DoJ to a House committee looking into whether the prosecutors were fired for investigating Republicans or not investigating Democrats, we learn that the Justice Department shot down Charlton's attempt to start a videotaping operation because agencies didn't want jurors to see how interrogators worked.

The FBI argued that "as all experienced investigators and prosecutors know, perfectly lawful and acceptable interviewing techniques do not always come across in recorded fashion to lay persons as a proper means of obtaining information from defendants. Initial resistance may be interpreted as involuntariness, and misleading a defendant as to the quality of the evidence against him may appear to be unfair deceit."

For its part, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms fought the change, stating, "Law enforcement interrogation techniques (although completely legal) may still be unsettling for some jurors in video and audio form."

As if. How many cop dramas or episodes of The Wire must any citizen see to get at least some idea of how cops bluff and intimidate suspects who are too stupid to shut up and lawyer up?

Salon's Glenn Greenwald, who first caught these documents out of the 3000 pages or so given to Congress, gets to the meat of the issue:

The difference between recording v. no recording is not whether the conduct of federal agents will be an issue in a trial. The difference is whether there will be an accurate or inaccurate record of what these law enforcement agents are doing to extract statements and obtain confessions. Yet here, every federal law enforcement agency is expressly arguing against recordings because they want to conceal from the jury what they did (or because they want to conceal what the defendant actually said).

Jurors, by definition, are randomly selected citizens from the communities in which defendants are tried. If they collectively find behavior of law enforcement agents to be coercive, unconscionable or excessive – and therefore likely to engender involuntary or unreliable statements and confessions – that seems to be rather compelling evidence that agents should not be engaged in that behavior.

Greenwald's post, which has links to the originals. Photo: Eric