Should police be allowed to lie to minors to get confessions? Some states are banning the practice.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It was one of the biggest blunders in Chicago law enforcement history: two boys, ages 7 and 8, were charged after allegedly confessing to the high-profile killing of 11-year-old Ryan Harris, critics say of the 1998 case.

At the time, the boys were the youngest suspects ever charged with murder in the United States. They had supposedly admitted to Ryan's killing in unrecorded questioning by detectives.

After semen was found on Ryan’s underwear, the boys were cleared. Calls came quickly from the media and scholars to record interrogations and to block deception, which was believed to have been used to get the boys to confess to Ryan's murder.

Outside of that interrogation room on Chicago’s South Side, it's still unclear exactly how police got the youngsters to admit to a molestation, beating and murder that was later determined to be committed by a known area rapist.

Last month, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a law forbidding police from lying to minors or promising leniency during interrogations. Now, advocates are working to legislate similar protections for youth in states dotting America.

Pritzker, a Democrat, said Senate Bill 2122 and others signed July 15 "advance the rights of some of our most vulnerable in our justice system, and they put Illinois at the forefront of the work to bring true reform."

'Wrongful conviction capital': Illinois to become first state to ban police officers from lying to minors during interrogations

"False confessions have played a role in far too many wrongful convictions," Pritzker said. The victims of deception suffer "life-altering" damage, he said. "That rings true for the youth who are most vulnerable to these tactics. My deep hope is that Illinois is setting an example for the entire nation to pass this law in all 50 states."

Other states are catching up.

The same day Illinois became the first, Oregon followed suit. New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Delaware and Washington state, among others, called officials in Illinois to inquire about the measure.

And in some states, such as New York, where the Central Park Five case became infamous for false confessions, efforts are underway to expand the laws to also cover adult suspects. Washington state has also considered legislation to include adults, said Rebecca Brown, director of policy at the national Innocence Project.

"I am optimistic that this will spill into adults because many of the same psychological factors that exist in young people also exist for adults," Brown said. "The difference, of course, is that young people are more vulnerable, based on the fact that their brains are not fully developed."

Effort to ensure 'history is never repeated'

Youth advocates and wrongful conviction experts say the change has been a long time coming. Ryan’s killing was in July 1998 — 23 years before Pritzker signed the new law, which doesn't take effect until Jan. 1.

But Ryan's death and the boys' arrests, which drew national attention, acrimony and second-guessing by police and prosecutors, built momentum. Chicago police began recording murder confessions not long after that case.

Seven years later, in 2005, Illinois passed a law requiring that the entirety of homicide interrogations be recorded, not just the moment a suspect confesses.

"True reform requires that lawmakers and prosecutors revisit past practices that have caused harm to ensure they never happen again," said Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx last month.

In a statement, she added, that the "history of false confessions in Illinois can never be erased, but this law is a critical step to ensuring that history is never repeated."

False confessions account for roughly 30% of the Innocence Project’s nearly 380 exonerations based on DNA. For minors, the numbers are higher: Children are two to three times more likely to give false confessions than adults are, according to the New York University Law Review.

The Illinois law has roots in a commission ordered by then-Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, to study why so many wrongful convictions have resulted from police and prosecutorial misconduct — something that led him to place a moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois in 2000.

Brown, of the Innocence Project, calls the laws in Illinois and Oregon, as well as the bills in other states, a “second generation reform.”

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“We wanted to first begin,” she said, “by creating a record of what transpires in the interrogation room, and then move into the methods that are employed in that room because you can only really understand those methods if you have a record of what took place.”

Once those interrogations were analyzed, advocates say the need for change became obvious, Brown said.

“We know of hundreds of false confession cases, cases where somebody is perfectly innocent, thanks to DNA forensic science,” said Laura Nirider, co-director of Northwestern University's Center on Wrongful Convictions and previous director of the school's Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth. “But they've confessed nonetheless to this crime. And so the question of course becomes why would anyone do this?”

The answer, she said, is simple: “It has everything to do with with the sort of interplay between psychological interrogation techniques and person being questioned — their vulnerabilities in the interrogation room. We know hundreds of these cases. Illinois is actually a leading state when it comes to false confessions."

The center has tallied 100 false confessions, and 31 of them were from juveniles.

Lying to suspects 'blessed' by U.S. Supreme Court 52 years ago

The United States Supreme Court paved the way for deceptive practices in the criminal justice system with a 1969 ruling.

In Frazier v. Cupp, the high court said it was legal for investigators to play loose with facts of a case when interrogating suspects. And the court didn’t put a cap on the size of the lie; pretty much anything can — or in Illinois and Oregon could — be said to minors and adults to get them to admit to a crime.

There is high pressure to clear high-profile cases, or any cases, to bring up often-low clearance rates for violent crime in the United States, experts say.

According to the Vera Institute of Justice, a review of FBI data shows that Part I crimes — violent crimes such as murder, sexual assault, armed robbery and arson — were solved at a rate of 33.25% in 2018.

The National Registry of Exonerations counts at least 89 cases of wrongful convictions based on lying by investigators that yielded false confessions. The cities and states where they occurred span the nation, and the charges range from child sexual abuse to supporting terrorism, manslaughter and murder.

And those are just the cases of reported and solved serious crimes. Many activists who challenge the police narrative claim data on clearance rates is inflated.

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The Reid Technique influences questioning of suspects

False confessions have been around since policing was born. But where investigators used to employ harsh, often barbaric methods to get a confession, a new method took hold in the modern era with the Reid Technique.

Started in 1947, "The Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation" is trademarked by Chicago-based John E. Reid and Associates Inc.

The technique involves a lot of psychological back and forth between police and suspects. It also allows for the misrepresentation of facts of a case police are working on.

At its core, according to critics, it involves deception and any sort of manipulation to bring a case to a close with a confession and promises of leniency — no matter whether the facts square with evidence, a suspect’s version of events or even an alibi.

"Most homicide detectives are intelligent, conscientious, and committed to a just outcome," according to a paper in Criminal Law Quarterly. "They conduct their interrogations in compliance with the training they received — almost invariably according to the principles of the Reid technique …(whose) principles are scientifically indefensible."

The article is from 2011, but even today lying — which the paper makes clear is a core tool of the technique — remains legal in all 50 states for adults and in all but Illinois and Oregon for minors. The technique is considered the most widely used tool in interrogations around the world.

The technique unfolds most often in two parts, Nirider said.

First, she said, officers "confront the person, tell them that they're cornered, that no one will believe they're innocent, and that you've got a mountain of evidence against them. That they're going down — they have no way out until they feel trapped."

The next step follows logically, she said.

Investigators say, "if you offer confession, it's a life raft, a way to make it a little bit better," Nirider said.

Over the years, Reid and Associates has defended his approach and teachings, saying that the technique is solid and does not instruct in deception or offers of leniency in exchange for a confession.

One of the largest police consulting firms in the country, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, stopped using the method and recommending it in 2017. It supported Illinois' new law banning deception.

In its 36-page defense of the technique, Reid and Associates wrote that “the vast majority of research studies do not mirror the context and structure of real life interviews that are conducted in the field, and, as a result, have very little relevancy to the real world.”

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Will evidence also spur laws to protect adults against deception?

The focus of the Illinois and Oregon bills on juveniles helped sway chiefs of police and prosecutors to the side of the bills' proponents. Oregon's law, for example, was sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Chris Gorsek, a first-term legislator who was formerly a police officer.

"On one level, there's an acknowledgement that children's brains just develop differently," said Brown, of the Innocence Project. "And I think in the court of public opinion, it is pretty morally indefensible to use deception with children.

While bringing adults into the mix is a "tougher road," Brown said: "We also know that perfectly mentally capable adults provide false confessions; we also know that mentally limited adults provide false confessions all the time. And so, if my sense is right, it's something that basically everyone could come together on."

Advocates of outlawing lying and pledges of leniency by police and prosecutors during interrogations feel a sense of momentum. But it's a more difficult sell on the adult side.

"Just the accumulation of a drumbeat of false confessions, one after another after another after another, over the course in so many years," Brown said. "And so many years lost for those individuals. So many dollars paid out by jurisdictions … to compensate those individuals, rightly, for the years that they lost.”

Among the wrongfully convicted on coerced confessions is Terrill Swift, who was part of the Englewood Four case that cost Chicago $31 million in a settlement and Cook County $24 million.

Swift, who was 17 at the time, and the three others were wrongfully convicted of a 1994 rape and murder.

Swift spent 15 years in prison before he and the three others — ages 18, 16 and 15 — were exonerated. He believes the Illinois bill could have prevented the wrong done to him.

"But the reality is, I can't get what I got back,” Swift said. “This happens so much. And there's something that needs to change… We still have so much work to do because there are so many brothers and sisters still (imprisoned) now wrongly.”

Follow Eric Ferkenhoff on Twitter: @EricFerk.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Illinois 1st state to ban police from lying to minors. Will more join?