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The Importance Of Juvenile Interrogation

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Overall, law enforcement is not adequately trained in interviewing and interrogating juveniles. While there are numerous courses available in forensic interviewing of children who may be victims, there are few training courses that target interrogative techniques for interviewing and interrogating youth who may be suspects or witnesses. Interview and interrogation is a standard training for law enforcement agencies, however, it typically does not cover the developmental deviations between adults and youth, nor does it cover recommended techniques that should be used with youth versus adults. This often leads law enforcement officials to use the same techniques on youth as with adults. Because of this, juveniles are more vulnerable to the pressures of the interrogation, which can cause them to give involuntary or even false confessions. In order to preserve the evidentiary value of a juvenile’s confession, the law enforcement official taking the confession must act with great caution. If I were a detective supervisor and needed to outline a policy for my detectives, when interviewing juveniles, I would incorporate a variety of them to ensure all confessions are …show more content…

It is essential to involve an adult in the juvenile interrogation process and to allow them to have meaningful opportunities to privately consult with the juvenile throughout the interrogation (The International Association of Chiefs of Police, 2017). My fourth be regarding the length of questioning. A juvenile interrogation should never last longer than four hours. In fact, juveniles can tolerate only about an hour of questioning before a necessity break should occur. In fact, if a child or adolescent is questioned for a prolonged period of time, the risk that any statement will be either involuntary or unreliable increases magnificently with each passing hour (The International Association of Chiefs of Police,

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