Law mandates taping of police interrogations
Blagojevich signs race profiling bill

By Steve Mills
Tribune staff reporter
July 18, 2003

Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Thursday signed into law a bill that requires police to tape homicide interrogations and confessions, a step the governor said would help restore integrity to the state's beleaguered criminal justice system.

Despite loopholes that left the bill weaker than its original form, experts said the law--the first in the nation to legislate the taping of interrogations in homicide cases--nevertheless will advance the cause of reform.
In time, the experts said, judges and juries will come to expect confessions to be audio- or videotaped while police will learn to live with the new requirement rather than risk undermining their own cases.

"I believe that no intelligent prosecutor or police captain is going to hope the exceptions will work," said Thomas P. Sullivan, a former U.S. attorney in Chicago and the co-chairman of the Commission on Capital Punishment, which recommended the videotaping of interrogations among 85 death-penalty reforms.
"It's not worth losing a confession in the hope some judge will agree with you later," he said. "The conservative thing to do is record."

First Assistant Cook County State's Atty. Robert Milan said the new law would present prosecutors and especially the police with one of the biggest challenges since the U.S. Supreme Court's Miranda ruling required them to read suspects the now-familiar listing of their rights.

But he said he was confident law enforcement would "rise to it."

"If law enforcement tries to get around it, it will look bad," Milan said. "It isn't with the spirit of the law and, I think, it's very ill-advised."

The bill, which Blagojevich signed at a ceremony in Woodson Regional Library on the South Side, was part of a package of criminal justice reforms.

The governor also signed bills banning police from racial profiling in traffic stops and requiring the collection of data to help determine whether motorists are being pulled over on the basis of race. He signed a bill to expunge the arrest records of people later found to be innocent as well.

But the centerpiece of the package was the taping bill, of which the governor said he initially was wary but came to support after long discussions with law enforcement officials across the state and changes to the bill.

In its final form, the bill requires police to videotape or audiotape questioning of suspects in homicides from beginning to end. Chicago police now videotape interrogations only at the end, when suspects confess.

Illinois joins Alaska and Minnesota as the only states that require police to tape homicide interrogations, though those states did so after court rulings rather than legislative action.

Blagojevich said bringing video cameras into the interrogation room would help restore the public's trust in a justice system that has seen 13 people released from Death Row and four pardoned based on innocence.
"We understand due to circumstances of the past the integrity of these investigations has been tainted in the eyes of the public," said Mark Donahue, the president of the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police.

"Realizing this, we worked with the sponsors of the legislation and were able to limit it to those [homicide] investigations found in the current form of the bill," Donahue added. "We're in agreement with the ideals of the legislation."

But the bill also includes exceptions. Police have to tape only inside police facilities; conceivably they could question the suspect before they arrive at a police station to avoid making a videotape.
Police also do not have to tape the interrogation if the suspect specifically requests that it not be taped--something critics fear police might persuade a suspect to request.

Moreover, the presumption that untaped interrogations are faulty--and consequently should be excluded as evidence at trial--has been watered down to where prosecutors can more easily make the argument that an untaped confession should be admitted.

The bill originally covered more crimes but was winnowed to where only homicide interrogations must be taped.

"The big question is whether the courts will allow the exceptions to swallow the rule," said Steven Drizin, a professor at Northwestern University's law school and a longtime advocate of videotaping confessions.
But he said the law represents a good first step and will go a long way toward piercing the secrecy of what happens inside the interrogation room.

"For the first time in Illinois, the courts will have an accurate record of what transpires during an interrogation in a homicide case. As a result, they'll be able to determine if confessions are true or false and whether they've been coerced," he said.

Dave Bayless, a Chicago police spokesman, estimated the costs of the law for his department at $3 million. Police have two years to implement the law.

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