Are we comfortable with prayer being used as a technique to get confessions?

Personally, I don't have a problem with it if it leads a criminal to confess a crime. But Mark Osler, professor of law at Baylor Law School, does have a problem with it, arguing that it demeans faith and is an improper tack for authorities of the state to take:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-osler/prayer-confession-and-the_b_603818.html

On June 1, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Berghuis v. Thompkins. At the heart of the facts of that case was this bit of dialogue, in which a police officer elicited an incriminating statement after nearly three hours of questioning:

The interviewer asked Thompkins if he believed in God.

"Yes," Thompkins replied. The Supreme Court opinion notes that at this point Thompkins made eye contact with the interviewer and "his eyes welled up with tears."

The interviewer forged on: "Do you pray to God?"

"Yes," the target again said.

Finally, the interviewer moved in to close the deal: "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?"

Again, the crying Thompkins said, "Yes," and his conviction was nearly assured.

The use of a defendant's faith to get a confession is not unusual. In California, for example, police got a confession from a woman after the detective told her, "There's something up above, bigger than both of us looking down saying, 'Celeste, you know that you shot that person in San Carlos and it's time to purge it all.'" Other cases have followed the same pattern.

Are we comfortable with prayer being used as a technique to get confessions? For many of us, there is something deeply troubling about this trend, which has been almost uniformly approved of by courts (as it was in Berghuis v. Thompkins). At the root of this discomfort, perhaps, is that that the police use of prayer for a law enforcement purpose seems to cut against the fundamental nature of prayer. In all faiths, prayer is a connection between God (or Gods) and the individual or religious community. It is singular, profound, and often beyond understanding. The reduction of prayer to a tool of the police reflects the harm that can be done to institutions of faith when they are taken over by the government.

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The express ruling made by the Supreme Court majority in their opinion (written by Justice Kennedy) concluded that Thompkins' confession was not coerced. More specifically, the majority held that the fact that the interviewer's question "referred to Thompkins' religious beliefs also did not render Thompkins statement involuntary," because the Fifth Amendment is "not concerned with moral and psychological pressures to confess emanating from sources other than official coercion."

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There is protocol for introducing lines of questioning.

I think the police have a lot of leeway in that situation, and as long as they don't coerce an innocent person into confessing, or use force or threats, I have no problem with using religion as a source of pressure...

In the second, it was just creepy. It did seem, especially in the second example, could elicit a false confession.

If they believe in that mumbo jumbo and do so enough to confess, let it be. They belong in the klink

I don't see how it's any different from asking a suspect what their parents would want, or their children. Appealing to one's conscience is an important element in eliciting confessions.

Before you can get the suspect to confess, it may be necessary to cast out one or more demons.

so "god will smite you down and doom your entire family to eternal flames if you do not confess", well, that would be coercive and should not be permitted because it might get an innocent person to confess in order to "save" himself and his family.

but suggesting prayer, in and of itself, i see no problem with; reminding a believer that god it watching, i have no problem with.