Assembly Bill 2644: Juvenile Interrogations Reform Bill

Picture this: you are cruising down California Highway 163 on a clear morning with your windows down, music blasting. You are driving to the gym, trying to hype yourself up for a killer workout to kick off the morning. Then, suddenly, you look in your rear-view mirror and see bright red and blue lights flashing. Your heart suddenly drops out of your chest and you quickly lower the music. Many thoughts race through your head: what did you do? What will the police officer say to you? And what can you do to expedite this unpleasant encounter as quickly as possible? The officer starts by asking you, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” You feel pressured to answer quickly and honestly. For most people, these series of questions come rapid-fire before you are sent on your way with a court date for a traffic infraction. The whole encounter feels like a blur, but you go on about your day.

Even as a criminal defense attorney and a former 911 police dispatcher, I have never been able to shake that “heart drop” feeling you get when you see those red and blue lights flashing. I have been fortunate enough to only have those lights flashing behind me when the stakes are low, such as in traffic infractions.

But now imagine this: instead, you are a 17-year-old kid in a high-pressure situation. You are arrested and taken into police custody to be interrogated about a rape and murder of a person you do not know. You are locked in a windowless room for hours, which feels like an eternity. Police officers tell you that you are going to die in jail. Those same officers tell you that you will never be going home nor seeing your family again. You start thinking about what got you in that position, what the police officer might physically do to you next if you do not say the right thing, and what you can do to end this psychologically manipulative encounter as quickly as possible. So, in an effort to get out of this impossible situation, you sign a confession admitting to the crime.

This was Exoneree Terrill Swift’s harsh reality, which resulted in his wrongful conviction at just 17 years old in Illinois, where he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Terrill served 14 of his 30-year sentence before being exonerated by DNA evidence.

Inspired by Terrill’s story and many like his, the California Innocence Coalition (CIC), in collaboration with California Assembly member Chris Holden (D-District 41), drafted and proposed Juveniles Custodial Interrogations Reform (AB 2644).

The CIC consists of the three innocence projects in California: the California Innocence Project, the Northern California Innocence Project and the Loyola Project for the Innocent. Collectively, the CIC has won the freedom of over 70 wrongly imprisoned individuals and has successfully helped pass laws that help prevent and remedy wrongful convictions.

According to the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, false confessions are one of the leading causes of wrongful convictions, accounting for 25% of all convictions that were later overturned based on DNA evidence. One study of 125 proven false confession cases found that 63% of false confessors were under the age of 25 and 32% were under the age of 18. Specifically in California, of the 274 people who have been exonerated since 1989, 17 of them were youth who were wrongfully convicted due to false confessions.

In identifying a need to prevent wrongful convictions stemming from false confessions in California, the CIC proposed AB 2644, which prohibits law enforcement’s use of deception, false threats, physical harm, and psychological manipulative tactics on youthful suspects during interrogations.

Currently, police officers are allowed to knowingly make false and deceptive claims to suspects, regardless of age, to extract confessions. These deceptive tactics include: (a) knowingly communicating false facts about evidence; (b) telling youth suspects that their denials will be futile; (c) downplaying the moral severity of the crime so as to suggest that whoever committed the crime has not done anything wrong; (d) telling youth suspects they will be released if they confess; (e) threatening the use of lie detector tests, despite their inadmissibility in a California court; (f) employing the ‘forced choice strategy,’ where suspects are forced to choose between two incriminating version of the facts; or (e) ‘contaminating’ an interrogation by disclosing non-public facts that only the true perpetrator would know.

AB 2644 prohibits law enforcement from employing many of the deceptive, coercive, and manipulative tactics mentioned above. In April, AB 2644 passed through the Assembly Public Safety Committee after hearing compelling testimony from Terrill stating that a law like this would have saved his life.

On September 13, 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill into law. By signing AB 2644 into law, California joined a national movement against the use of deceptive interrogation tactics on young people. Similar legislation recently passed in Illinois, Oregon, and Utah, and is pending legislation in New York.

If you are interested in keeping up with all of the criminal legal reform work here in California, subscribe to both the California Innocence Project (CIP) and California Innocence Coalition (CIC) for updates.

For more information, contact CIP’s Staff Attorney Fellow Claudia Salinas at csalinas@cwsl.edu or 619-525-1485.