Fix flaws in videotaping confessions

Illinois' law requiring the videotaping of all homicide confessions is still young, but it is quickly showing that police departments have much to learn about recording interviews with suspects, if not about interviewing them in the first place.

In a lengthy speech from the bench last week, Cook County Judge Thomas Fecarotta expressed reservations about the handling of a suspect in about 12 hours of a videotaped interview about a killing in Elk Grove Village.

He found the experience both "interesting and disappointing," Fecarotta said before ruling that about 45 minutes of the tape cannot be used at trial. His disappointments? That the suspect was interviewed for half an hour before he was read his rights to have an attorney present. That police came "dangerously close" to so diluting the suspect's Miranda rights that they almost did not exist. And that police failed to read those rights again after a break in the interview.

Although the judge's ruling leaves more than 11 hours of the interview on the record, his comments raise serious questions about how well-prepared police departments are for videotaped confessions. For this is hardly an isolated case.

Most of a videotaped statement by Diana Thames, now being tried for a killing in Palatine, was disallowed because of questions about how investigators dealt with her and her interest in having her attorney present.

In one of the suburbs' most celebrated cases, videotaped statements by James Degorski, accused of participating in the killings of seven people at Brown's Chicken restaurant, were thrown out over Miranda-rights issues.

Such high-profile problems with videotaped confessions can't help but raise questions about what was happening with confessions before videotaping was required.

Nor is the issue limited to inexperience of investigators in departments that do not see many homicides. The Elk Grove Village interrogation included representatives of both the local department and an elite regional task force.

In making his ruling, Fecarotta acknowledged, as do we, that interrogating suspects in a way that will get them to confess to murder on videotape is a delicate business, requiring special skills and a certain rapport between the suspect and police.

But everyone involved in the process must remember two vitally important things: One, that the point of this delicate business is to elicit not just any confession but the confession of the person who is guilty. And two, the possible result of a mishandled confession is the elimination of evidence that could be key to assuring that a guilty person is held responsible for his or her crime.

To be sure, most investigators follow the law, or want to. As a Chicago attorney who played a role in developing it says: "They know the consequences if they don't."

That knowledge notwithstanding, in the early stages of the new law's implementation, these cases are showing that authorities need either to get more training or to take more care in the fine points of getting a videotaped record from people supposedly confessing to the most heinous of crimes.