Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) has vetoed a bill that would require District police to videotape interrogations of suspects in serious crimes, a proposal that enjoyed broad support from the D.C. Council.
The council approved the tape-recording bill by a vote of 12 to 1 last month as part of an effort to force D.C. police to comply with a similar requirement that had been on the D.C. books for more than two years and that the department for the most part had not followed.
But Williams notified the council in a letter Friday that he cannot support the bill because it could make unrecorded confessions inadmissible in court and let violent criminals go free. D.C. Attorney General Robert J. Spagnoletti and the U.S. attorney's office supported the mayor's decision.
The former and current leaders of the council's Judiciary Committee criticized the mayor yesterday and vowed that the council would override the veto. They also argued that D.C. police could have avoided the new bill and the threat of losing evidence to prosecute suspected criminals if the department had complied with the existing law and recorded interrogations over the past two years.
"The first word that comes to mind is 'outrageous,' " council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), who became the Judiciary Committee chairman this year, said of the mayor's veto. "This isn't a draconian penalty. It's only draconian if they're not interested in following the law."
In the overwhelming number of cases, when D.C. police officers sit down at a police station to question a suspect in a serious crime, they are required to videotape the interrogation. That has been the law since 2002. The council passed the law in response to concern about public mistrust of police-obtained confessions and allegations of coerced confessions in other communities.
But in a report to the council presented late last year, the department acknowledged that the requirement had not been implemented consistently. Barely 20 percent of the interrogations that should have been recorded last year were recorded even in part, according to the report.
That prompted the council to pass last month's bill, which would impose a new burden in court on police if they failed to record an interrogation. Under the bill, a court would presume that any statements police failed to record were involuntary and thus inadmissible. Police would be able to get the statements admitted only if they presented clear evidence to a court that the statements were made voluntarily.
"While I share the Council's view that electronic recording of interrogations is desirable, the sanction to exclude an unrecorded statement goes too far and provides an unacceptable vehicle for violent and dangerous offenders to escape criminal prosecutions," the mayor wrote in his letter Friday to Council Chairman Linda W. Cropp (D-At Large).
Spagnoletti said yesterday that he supports recording but that the new burden is "very drastic."
He said excluding evidence is usually called for only when someone's constitutional rights have been violated.
He also complained that if police made a mistake -- forgetting to turn on the camera, for example, or simply questioning someone before they realized the person was a suspect -- the prosecution would have to meet a high legal burden to get crucial statements admitted in court.
"I certainly understand council's frustration with [D.C. police] in not getting a more solid policy in place sooner," Spagnoletti said. "But there's not a huge problem [with involuntary confessions] in the District here that needs to be corrected. The sanction is grossly out of whack."
Mendelson said he was stunned to learn late Friday that the mayor had vetoed the bill.
He and former Judiciary Committee chairwoman Kathy Patterson (D-Ward 3) complained that the mayor's and prosecutors' predictions of guilty suspects going unpunished were illogical and exaggerated. They said any minor mistakes in recording would be quickly understood and accepted by a judge.
"I think it's a huge mistake, both politically and policy-wise, to veto national best practices," Patterson said.
The mayor and prosecutors said the provision to exclude evidence appears to be the most restrictive in the country; Mendelson and Patterson said that was an exaggeration. So far, six states have mandatory recording of confessions: Alaska, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and Texas.
Mendelson said police and prosecutors should take note of how frequently District jurors express reluctance to believe police and the confessions they obtain from suspects.
"Videotaping in the long run is more beneficial to the prosecution than the defense," he said. "That eliminates the suspicion that the confession was obtained with coercion."
