Law & Psychiatry: Deception, Coercion, and the Limits of Interrogation

Abstract

This column discusses the recent case of U.S. v. Boskic to highlight issues related to voluntariness--in particular, the voluntariness of a confession. At a meeting with U.S. government agents, Boskic, a Croat from Bosnia living in the United States, confessed to involvement in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The agents had deceived him about the meeting's purpose and did not disclose that they had a warrant for his arrest. The courts were asked to decide whether the confession was involuntary, and thus not admissible as evidence, on the basis of whether the deception was coercive.