Police Interrogation and American Justice

"Harvard University Press has just published

University

of

San Francisco Law Professor Richard Leo

's new book, Police Interrogation and American Justice (2008).  Based on more than a decade of research, including a significant amount of primary research most scholars in the area don't have, Leo's book chronicles and analyzes more than a century of police interrogation in United States, including the rise and decline of the third degree, the movement for police professionalization that resulted in behavioral lie detection and police training manuals, the psychology of police interrogation practices, the problems of false confession and wrongful conviction of the innocent, and various policy and legal responses to the issues and contradictions raised by police interrogation and confession-taking in the American adversary system of criminal justice.

University

of

Michigan Law Professor Yale Kamisar

has called Police Interrogation and American Justice, "The best book on police interrogation I have ever read," and Northwestern Law Professor Albert Alschuler adds: "If you want to understand American criminal justice -- really understand it -- you must read this book."