Breaking Point

Why do innocent people confess to crimes that they did not commit? This project explores law enforcement overreach in the interrogation room. Specifically, it explores how coercive interrogation tactics lead to false confessions.

Breaking Point is a photographic project that examines law enforcement overreach through the lived experiences of exonerees who were wrongfully convicted after being coerced into false confessions. Each participant was subjected to interrogation practices that prioritized closure and control over truth, revealing how institutional power can override individual rights with devastating consequences.

The project situates false confessions not as isolated miscarriages of justice, but as outcomes of a broader system that allows — and often rewards — coercion, intimidation, and psychological manipulation. Prolonged questioning, isolation, deception, and threats were used to extract compliance rather than facts. Inside the interrogation room, the authority of law enforcement became absolute, and the protections meant to safeguard the innocent failed.

While rooted in past cases, Breaking Point speaks directly to the present. The same mechanisms of overreach that enabled these wrongful convictions echo in contemporary practices across the United States, including aggressive surveillance, detention, and interrogation tactics employed by federal law enforcement agencies such as ICE. When such agencies operates with minimal transparency and accountability, entire communities become vulnerable, and legality drifts dangerously close to abuse.

The photographs are developed collaboratively with the exonerees, emphasizing agency in contrast to the powerlessness they once endured. Rather than depicting events literally, the images function as psychological spaces shaped by pressure, silence, and restraint. They ask viewers to confront how easily authority can become coercive, and how quickly justice can be compromised when power goes unchecked.

Breaking Point ultimately challenges viewers to question not only how false confessions happen, but what they reveal about the expanding reach of law enforcement — and the human cost of allowing it to go unexamined.

The project emerges directly from my work as a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, where I helped design and conduct campaigns to reform the American criminal justice system. I came to view that system as deeply flawed, prioritizing expediency and finality over justice. Meaningful change will only occur if the public knows and cares about the system’s deficiencies.