Shortly after Christmas 1994, 11-year-old Amber Doggett and her little sister were brought to the police station in Wenatchee, Washington, to answer some questions. The girls were separated and, later, in an interrogation room, a detective asked Doggett if her parents had ever sexually abused her.
They hadn’t, she said.
Yes, they had, the detective insisted.
He said he knew that because Doggett’s three older siblings had already said so, and had described the abuse in detail to police. He said it stood to reason that Doggett couldn’t see this clearly, as she’d been brainwashed.
None of this was true. The siblings hadn’t accused their parents or given detailed accounts. Doggett, who now lives in Grand Junction, hadn’t been abused at all.
It was legal at that time for police in every U.S. state to manipulate facts during interrogations. Lying to kids in this way remains legal in all but two states, with Colorado primed to become the third.
Law enforcement officials in Colorado argue that lying can help secure information and confessions that build cases. The cops in Wenatchee, convinced at the time of a sexual abuse ring in their community that did not actually exist, were willing to manipulate the facts in order to build theirs.
Doggett eventually relented. She lied to the cops who had lied to her, agreeing that she’d been abused.
“What the (expletive) was I supposed to do? I was 11 years old,” Doggett said. “It was nighttime, I couldn’t just walk out of the police station alone. I was in a situation where everything was just so terrifying. My brain switched to survival mode.”
The next day she was put through a sexual assault examination that humiliated her. The police told her the exam returned proof she’d been abused by her parents — another lie.
The consequences of the sham stretched for many years. Doggett was placed in foster care and her parents were arrested, convicted and sent to prison. She grew depressed and fell behind in school. She lost her appetite and started to self-harm, and was eventually institutionalized and heavily medicated. She had a hard time trusting adults.
Her parents were ultimately cleared of all charges and the fictitious Wenatchee sex abuse ring was long ago debunked. She’s doing much better now in Mesa County, where she’s a social worker. But healing took time.
“I have just recently started to get my (life) together, but that didn’t happen until I was in my early 30s,” she said. “I couldn’t form trusting relationships, I couldn’t form intimate relationships.”
The bill
Doggett detailed her experience before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which on Feb. 10 passed the bill to ban police from lying to children in interrogations, SB22-23, on a party-line vote.
The bill would bar police officers, plus anyone working with them on an interrogation of anyone under 18 in custody, from using “deception and false facts or beliefs” in order to obtain a statement or an admission of guilt from that kid. The barred tactics would include lying about nonexistent evidence or making false promises about how a kid can secure their freedom, or at least a better outcome, by telling police what they want to hear.
SB22-23 would also create a baseline presumption that any statement or confession obtained through deception tactics is not admissible in court. It would require police to electronically record all interrogations of children in custody.
The lead sponsors, all Democratic women of color from Denver, say it’s inappropriate and unnecessary for police to lie to secure information or confessions. If a case is sound, they argue, why toy with a subject by telling them, say, that police found fingerprints they didn’t actually find, or have video footage they don’t actually have? They argue that because kids are particularly susceptible to manipulation, it is urgent, and even overdue, for the legislature to create new protections.
“I don’t think anybody should be lied to, but kids, especially, are still learning, still developing, ” said Rep. Serena Gonzales-Gutierrez, a sponsor who, outside of the legislature, has worked extensively with children in vulnerable situations. “We keep hearing about a lack of trust with law enforcement. This is one way to try to rebuild that trust that kids could have with law enforcement.”
She remembers well the distrust she felt and observed among kids in Denver who looked like her. As a child in the backseat of her parents’ car, she’d see Latino and Chicano children lined up on a curb, trapped for violating curfew laws that she knew were never enforced in white neighborhoods. For people in general and for kids in heavily policed areas most of all, she said, genuine trust is impossible as long as one side has legal permission to tell lies.
Her co-sponsor, Rep. Jennifer Bacon, is a former Denver school board member who has done dozens of “know your rights” training sessions in local schools.
“I know how to be in white spaces with kids who don’t ask the same questions,” she said. “The way they talk about law enforcement is to be helpful — how can I call police to help if I’ve been attacked? Those sorts of things.”
It’s in non-white spaces, she said, where students are on higher alert about being coerced, and about the various ways that a single encounter with police can change a person or family forever.
The data
There is not much documented evidence that police lies have created lots of situations comparable to Amber Doggett’s in Colorado.
The National Registry of Exonerations, housed at the University of Michigan, charts about 3,000 exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. Of that group, only 11 happened in Colorado. In only three of the 11 cases were the subjects younger than 18 at the date of the reported crime. Of the 3,000, just over 10% involved false confessions.
But the women of color helming and backing this effort believe that for every shocking, headline-grabbing story like Doggett’s, there are countless and mostly less dramatic instances of police deception against children. They believe this, they say, because they hear about it all the time.
Democratic Sen. Janet Buckner gets it from parents in her Aurora district.
“As a Black woman with Black children, I know that so many times, what happens with the white kids doesn’t happen with the Black kids. And that’s just a fact,” she said. “I know too many people who have been affected.”
She noted on the Senate floor recently that Black youth are vastly overrepresented in Colorado youth detention centers, and, according to the state’s data, are also much more likely than white children to be referred to law enforcement at school.
Said Bacon, of the dearth of documented Colorado cases relevant to her bill, “If three kids are lied to and they lose their lives in jail, that’s bad enough. It shouldn’t matter if it’s 1,000 versus three.”
But, she continued, “It does matter that when you talk to children, and (I’ve) done this like 40 times, that they all have the same questions and it’s all the same looking kids. That matters. … If we keep seeing these disparities, they come from somewhere.”
The pushback
Law enforcement leaders in Colorado oppose this bill. So do Republicans. Democrats control both chambers of the Capitol, plus the governor’s office, and so they can — and likely will — pass this policy in spite of these protests.
Last week, the Senate voted 18-16 to send the bill to the House. All 18 were Democrats. All 16, except for Democrat Joann Ginal of Fort Collins, were Republicans.
The case against the bill rests largely on the ideas that it’s not needed, as parents already have the right to accompany kids in interrogation rooms, and both parents and kids in those situations must be read Miranda rights. Opponents note that judges already have discretion to toss statements or confessions obtained through trickery, if they’re so inclined. They point to the lack of available data to bolster the Democrats’ case. And they argue that deception is sometimes an important and useful tool that should not be outright banned.
“Let’s say a detective is interviewing somebody in custody who’s believed to have committed a murder outside the Capitol,” said Democratic Boulder D.A. Michael Dougherty to the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaking on behalf of his fellow district attorneys in the state. “The detective falsely says, ‘I have video of you doing it.’ And then the person says, ‘OK, you got me. I did it.’ This bill really highlights, is that appropriate or not? Should that be allowed or not? Should law enforcement be allowed to take that step? And there are a lot of reasons why the answer is yes.”
Dutch Smith, a veteran member of the Lakewood Police Department who spent a decade assigned to Lakewood High School, offered another scenario: A person has been murdered. A child is suspected of the murder but does not know, at the time of their interrogation, that their victim is indeed dead.
“I want to continue my investigation,” Smith testified in the Senate. “If you tell them right away the person is deceased, they might not want to talk anymore.”
The movement
Research suggests that if accuracy is the goal, lying doesn’t always help. That, many expert criminologists say, is because the more convincing an authority sounds, the more inclined a child is to go along with the story.
“Kids are statistically overrepresented in the archives of false confessions,” said Saul Kassin, a professor who studies false confessions at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, to the Senate committee. “Kids are more compliant in the face of authority. More likely to surrender, to capitulate. More suggestible.”
Backers of the bill argue that a false confession not only hurts the person giving the confession but harms public safety, too. An innocent person behind bars means a guilty person who got away with it, bill sponsor Sen. Julie Gonzales, a Democrat from Denver, told her colleagues during the chamber’s debate.
Said Kassin, “When (people) are under great stress, they want nothing more than to get out of this bad situation, no matter what it takes. They’re not thinking about future consequences. They just — ‘I gotta do what it takes to make this stop.’ And children have more of that tendency than adults do.”
Doggett knows the feeling.
“I had no power,” she said. “I repeatedly expressed what I wanted, which was to go home, and I was repeatedly denied that. … They weren’t believing me and they wouldn’t let me go home, so I felt I had no choice but to lie. I didn’t see any other way of getting out of that room.”
What makes the tactic of deception so “devastating,” Kassin said, is that most people — and especially kids — don’t know that police are allowed by law to lie in this way. Several lawmakers even told The Denver Post they weren’t aware the tactic was sanctioned in this and other states.
It’s been banned in countries like England, France, Spain, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Australia and Japan. The Colorado bill fits into a national movement that already includes laws shielding kids from interrogation lies in Illinois and Oregon, and could soon include laws in several other states.
“The sky has not fallen” in places that took this step, Kassin told lawmakers. “What has happened is they’ve had a curtailment of false confession cases.”
Still, many Colorado lawmakers — though likely not a majority — find this unpersuasive, and believe that while the legislature can and should improve protections for kids, those moves must not interfere with the ability of law enforcement to solve crimes.
Banning deception tactics, argued former Weld County Sheriff and current state Sen. John Cooke, is “anti-law enforcement, anti-public safety, pro-criminal.”
He appealed to his fellow senators before the chamber’s final vote last week: “What if it was your kid? What if it was your child that was kidnapped, and the only way to get him back was to say a deceptive statement to the juvenile that might have information? What if it was your child that was murdered? Wouldn’t you want law enforcement to use every tool that they have in their tool belt to solve that crime?”
Sen. Kerry Donovan, a Democrat of Vail, took the lectern after him.
“A good question to ponder,” she said. “I would ask us to ponder the flip side of that coin: Wouldn’t you want your kid who was in a scary situation to not be led into a conversation that could weigh them down for the balance of their lives?”
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