Mass. High Court Urges Police to Record Confessions

Harshly criticizing the use of unrecorded criminal confessions, the state's highest court on Monday strongly discouraged police from taking statements without having a tape-recorder rolling. While stopping just short of requiring police to record all interrogations, the Supreme Judicial Court said that when police fail to record them, defendants will be entitled to a judge's instruction that the jury should weigh unrecorded statements "with great caution and care." In a divided, 4-3 ruling, the court overturned an arson conviction in a case that relied heavily on the defendant's unrecorded statements. Valerio DiGiambattista was convicted of burning down a Newton house owned by his former landlord in 1998. But the high court said DiGiambattista's confession should have been suppressed because police used trickery to obtain it and implied that he would receive leniency if he confessed. [more ]