Corrections / Police / Criminal Justice
Would I lie to a suspect to get a confession even it was legal to do so?
Legal or not, lying to get a confession creates a moral black hole for an officer. To wit, how would an officer who was otherwise a good Christian later feel about getting a conviction albeit he obtained that conviction through deception? That is the question here. Chances are he would feel guilty; and it's possible that his wife, if she knew he used lies to tease a confession out of a suspect, would confront him. He would have had no place to hide from his sin in his earthly world and certainly spiritually he would live with a sense of guilt. Looked at a different way, when a good officer who was not a Christian but has always practiced ethical values is told by his superiors in the State of Virginia that lying is legal -- is he then going to use the law to get a confession? If the court in Virginia that made the ruling underwent a thorough legal analysis by objective scholars one would think that evaluation would reveal serious ethical problems.
Moreover, because cheating is lying, it appears that many Americans believe lying is okay somehow. Recent surveys have shown that "large-scale cheating" has been uncovered at the Air Force Academy, Harvard University, and in high schools (Perez-Pena, 2012). Indeed, surveys...
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