Police Lying

6 Pages 1497 Words

Tampering with evidence and committing perjury is becoming a common practice for law enforcement officers. These two forms of corruption are synonymous because they both involve lying. Police lying is perhaps the most widespread form of police wrongdoing facing today’s criminal justice system (Sexton 1994). Such police corruption is prevalent in major cities such as Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C., and New Orleans. Police lying is so popular that it has its own nickname: “testilying” (NACDL 2003). There are various reasons officers engage in testilying, but such displays of misconduct is deplorable.
Officers lie in order to ensure the conviction of persons they believe are guilty. There is the desire to see the guilty brought to justice. The police do not want a person they know to be a criminal to escape conviction simply because of a “technical” violation of the Constitution, a procedural formality, or a trivial exculpatory fact (Slobogin 1996). Officers use deceptive tactics because they are skeptical of a system that suppresses truth in the interest of the criminal, (Skolnick 1982).
The O.J. Simpson trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman revealed police deception that occurred for these vary reasons. Los Angeles Detectives Marc Fuhrman and Philip Vannatter both perjured themselves to conceal unethical practices during the criminal investigation. The detectives engaged in corrupt activities such as planting a glove smeared with Nicole’s blood on Simpson’s property and falsifying information to obtain a warrant to search Simpson’s home. Los Angeles police knew O.J. had a history of battering Nicole, so in their eyes he was guilty of murder. They wanted to ensure that his conviction.
Another reason Law Enforcement officers lie is to conceal illegal acts of fellow officers (Slobogin 1996). There is a code of silence amongst officers that is maintained to protect the department and...