Interrogation Tactics On Trial

The state’s highest court is deciding whether New Haven cops coerced a confession out of a man serving a lifetime murder sentence — and in the process deciding how far detectives can go in an interrogation room.

The case involved Bobby Griffin Jr., who was sentenced to 90 years in prison after being convicted of the 2013 murder of Nathaniel Bradley on the Ella T. Grasso Boulevard in New Haven.

In arguments before the Connecticut State Supreme Court Monday, defense attorney Lisa Steele argued that the detectives’ tactics amounted to coercion.

Assistant State’s Attorney Matthew Weiner countered on behalf of the state that in the particular context of the case, the police methods were not overly manipulative.

Their arguments, heard as Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality rose up across the country, raised questions about the ethics of certain police interrogation tactics. Is it coercive for a police officer to lie about the evidence against a suspect or about the potential consequences of a confession? To what extent can a video recording provide insight into a defendant’s state of exhaustion or presence of mind? Where exactly is the line between an involuntary confession and a freely-given one?

Oral arguments for the case were held online during a special term of the court that began in June.

Prosecutors charged that Griffin shot Bradley twice and killed him during an attempted robbery. Police officers later found the rifle in Griffin’s house.

Upon his arrest, Griffin was jailed from 3 a.m. to 10 a.m. in a cell without a bed, and his lawyers claim that he did not sleep.

At 10 a.m., New Haven Detectives Nicole Natale and David Zaweski interrogated him for three and a half hours in an interaction that was captured on a video recording. Over the course of the questioning, Natale and Zaweski told Griffin that multiple eyewitnesses had named him as the shooter and that his fingerprints were found on shell casings associated with the murder. That wasn’t true.

The detectives threatened at one point that he would ​“fry” in the electric chair, even though the death penalty had been abolished in Connecticut a year prior in 2012. They also suggested that there could be criminal consequences for Griffin’s family if he did not confess to the crime.

After maintaining innocence for multiple hours, Griffin eventually said he was guilty. His admission of guilt proved to be a key piece of evidence in the trial resulting in his conviction; Griffin later argued that the confession had been untrue.

His case has since been taken on by the Connecticut Innocence Project, a division of the state’s Public Defender Services.

“Wake Up”

Steele argued that existing case law has not incorporated relatively recent social science research on interrogation techniques that disproportionately lead to false confessions.

She said that tactics including deception, the minimization of the potential consequences of confessing, and ​“extensive” custody combined with sleep deprivation are disproportionately likely to lead to false confessions.

False confessions are far more common than most realize, she said, even though confessions serve as uniquely powerful pieces of evidence in court.

In briefs submitted on behalf of the defendant, the Connecticut Innocence Project wrote that nearly 30 percent of all DNA exoneration cases had involved a false confession.

In Griffin’s particular case, Steele argued that he had been severely lacking sleep. She cited a moment in the video footage of the interrogation when Griffin leaned his head against the wall and closed his eyes. At times, the detectives can be heard telling Griffin to ​“wake up.”

“This is the most important conversation of this man’s life,” she said. ​“He’s told that he may have the death penalty. And he falls asleep? Something’s wrong here.”

Steele argued that in addition to having been sleep deprived, Griffin has an intellectual disability, possessing an IQ of around 80 or 85. Those factors, she said, made him particularly prone to confessing after detectives told him that there were multiple witnesses who saw him commit the crime, that his fingerprints were found on the bullet, and that his family members might be charged with a crime if he did not admit guilt.

For these reasons, she said, the trial judge should have excluded the confession.

“He is a 21 year old young African American man being told that two strangers identify him as being part of a shooting, they’re absolutely confident about it, they’ve made an identification,” Steele later said as the justices asked her questions. Both of the detectives who interrogated Griffin are white. ​“From his point of view, who does he expect the judge is going to believe?”

The interrogation did not involve ​“a technique where the officers are standing up and badgering the guy, like you’d see in a bad movie,” Steele said. ​“But it is nonetheless coercive.”

“Context Matters”

Assistant State’s Attorney Weiner conceded that false confessions are possible consequences of lies or threats on the part of the police. But, he argued, the particularities of the Natale and Zaweski’s interrogation of Griffin did not amount to coercion.

“Context matters,” he said.

Weiner argued that in the moment when Griffin rested his head against the wall in the video, it was unclear whether he had closed his eyes because he was actually asleep, because he was ​“faking,” or because he was exasperated or emotional.

He also dismissed Steele’s claims pertaining to Griffin’s IQ, saying, ​“the State disputes any notion that this defendant was intellectually disabled.”

Moreover, he argued, a jury should be tasked with determining how much weight to give the confession.

This gave one justice, who did not announce their name in the audio recording, pause.

“To me, it seems like this is one of those things where you need somebody with some kind of expertise to help you navigate this minefield. How is a lay person supposed to tell when your voluntariness has been overcome?” the justice asked.

Weiner noted that, in an unusual practice, the jury had been instructed to consider the possibility of a false confession. The jury had explicitly been told that ​“police lies … can render a statement involuntary,” he said.

The justice was not convinced, comparing the instructions to ​“a situation where a medical professor at a medical college comes to a high school and explains how to do brain surgery.”

Weiner replied that the defense could have called up an expert to instruct the jury about signs of a false confession, and that jurors likely used their own lived experiences to interpret the video of the interrogation when determining whether the confession was voluntarily given.

Free Choice?

In a question addressed to Steele, Justice Gregory D’Auria noted that only recently did the police begin to keep video recordings of confessions.

The footage resolves disputes over the sequence of questions, statements, and gestures that ensued during the interrogation. But it doesn’t necessarily clear up the defendant’s state of mind or the extent to which his confession was freely given.

“It is clear that [Griffin] was up for a long time. It is clear that a couple of times he closes his eyes. It’s clear that occasionally, the detectives say, ​‘Wake up, Bobby, this is important.’” D’Auria said. But if the burden is on the state to prove that the confession was voluntarily given, ​“how does the state prove that he’s not tired?”

Steele answered that the detectives should have recognized signs of sleep deprivation during the interrogation, in the same way that they identify signs of intoxication.

“They should have known from their own booking records: Is there a place for him to sleep?” she added.

Weiner was also pressed on the concrete metrics for determining whether the confession was voluntary.

“This was a textbook interrogation in some sense,” said Justice Steven Ecker. ​“The whole design [of interrogation practices] is to overcome somebody’s will.” For hours, Griffin ​“just said ​‘No, No,’” Ecker noted. When he changed his story, ​“either his will was overborne or it was something else. I need your help telling me how this was a free choice as opposed to a coerced choice.”

Weiner said that Griffin offered several possible narratives of events before confessing. ​“This video shows a suspect who believes he could talk his way out of it,” he argued. Griffin might have had a change of heart leading him to ultimately confess, he said, as he had been ​“staring at the picture of the victim” just before confessing.

Ecker seemed to disagree. ​“My reading of the situation was that the detectives were telling him that he had a choice between murder by accident or intentional, deliberate, monstrous murder. … There was this idea that he was going to make a choice between a more severe sanction and a less severe charge.” That choice wasn’t truly there, Ecker said; that suggestion was a ​“falsification of consequences.”

Also speaking to Weiner, Justice Raheem Mullins drew attention to the gravity and high stakes of the question of whether the confession had been coerced. He noted that for a long time, eyewitness testimony was considered highly persuasive evidence until social science raised serious questions about its reliability.

“A confession out of the defendant’s own mouth is something that jurors are really not likely to disregard. We can tell them a bunch of things, but that’s powerful evidence,” he said. ​“Why shouldn’t we take a stronger stance on what police should be able to do and shouldn’t be able to do in the context of the confession, particularly if we’re in the realm of deciding voluntariness?”

“It’s difficult to turn a blind eye to how many false confessions and false convictions there are and this might be one of the areas where we can have something to say about that,” Mullins added.

“The social science isn’t as clear on this as it was in the eyewitness context,” Weiner argued. He asked the justices again and again to turn to the ​“particular facts of this case,” which he maintained did not amount to coercion.