We provide a model of custodial interrogations in which the suspect is privately informed about his guilt and the likely strength of incriminating evidence and law enforcers are privately informed about the actual evidence. The evidence is directly informative about the suspect's guilt and may also disprove his eventual lies. We study how communication in the interrogation and the accuracy of prosecution decisions vary with the scope of protection of the suspect's right to silence, the relative

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... costs of type I and type II errors for law enforcers and the evidence strength standard for interrogating. We also evaluate the scope for deceptive interrogation tactics when the suspect is prone to deception. Finally, we describe the optimal mechanism under full commitment over law enforcers' decisions and a natural sequential game that implements it. Our results offer important insights for the design of the legal system.