SUB-HEADING: "The author of “Free: My Search for Meaning” says she will continue to fight for change to interrogation tactics."
SUB-HEADING: "Confessing to a crime you didn’t commit seems unthinkable, but growing research shows it does happen (Video: Jason Crow, Owen Hornstein, Lance Washington)."
By Kristin Crowley, Jason Crow, Owen Hornstein and Lance Washington
Published: Mar. 24, 2025 at 2:18 PM EDT|Updated: 6 hours ago
GIST: "Confessing to a crime you didn’t commit seems unthinkable, but growing research and real-life examples show it does happen.
Chances are you’ll recognize the name of one woman it happened to: Amanda Knox.
Her face was plastered on every news station, in magazines and in newspapers. Seemingly overnight, Amanda Knox went from a life of obscurity to one of infamy.
In 2007, while studying abroad in Italy, the then 20-year-old was accused of taking part in the rape and murder of her roommate, Meredith Kircher. It was a crime she didn’t commit, and it would take years before she would prove she was innocent.
“It was the worst experience of my life, and no one should ever have to go through what I went through,” Knox said.
But she wasn’t talking about standing trial for murder or the jury’s guilty verdict. She wasn’t even talking about the four years she spent in an Italian prison. For Knox, the worst experience of her life started at the beginning of the ordeal: The police interrogation.
“Every time I asserted I was at my boyfriend’s house, I did not go out that night, they said, ‘no you didn’t,‘” Knox said.
The interrogation went on for more than 50 hours over five days. Amanda vehemently denied she had anything to do with her roommate’s murder. But she said one thing changed everything: When the police lied.
“So, they’re telling me new information. ‘We know you were at your house. We have irrefutable proof.’ And now I’m put in a position of trying to make sense of that. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I have no memory of being at my house,” Knox said.
Knox said she started doubting her own memories. Her self-doubt became so strong that when the police typed up a confession, she signed it.
“I just did exactly what the police told me to do. I was exhausted, I was confused, I didn’t know even really what I was signing,” she said.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1969 said deception by police was allowed, but experts say that was before there was data showing it can lead to false confessions.
“We know one of the top contributors to false or unreliable confessions is the use of the false evidence ploy of lying about evidence,” said David Thompson, a certified forensic interviewer with Wicklander-Zulawski and Associates, who trains police all over the country on interrogation practices.
“So, they can say, ‘we have your fingerprints on the gun,’ or ‘we have video surveillance of you starting that fire,‘” Thompson said. “It has a lot of power to maybe convince people to confess, maybe guilty people. It also causes maybe innocent people to have memory distrust and think, ‘Well, maybe I did do that.‘”
Thompson said new research has led his firm to change its teachings and get away from deception.
“The research has also found that more evidence-based techniques of being open and transparent will get you more reliable information, which in fact helps you close out cases more effectively and more accurately,” Thompson said.
In all of the exoneration cases Zarowsky’s group helped with that involved police deception, she said none had a recorded interrogation. But InvestigateTV+ found an example of police deception during a 2018 interrogation in Fontana, California.
“That’s what scares me, is like, that what they’re saying to me isn’t real,” said Thomas Perez during an interrogation. He was brought in for questioning by police after reporting his father missing. During the interrogation, police dropped a bombshell.
“We just told you we found your dead dad. And you don’t give a f***,” one officer exclaimed.
Five hours into the interrogation, Thomas Perez started confessing.
“What about the scissors?” police asked him.
“That’s possible,” Perez responded.
“Did you stab him?” police asked.
“I didn’t think that I did,” Perez said.
‘How many times?” detectives later pressed.
“One,” Perez says, almost questioningly.
But Perez didn’t kill his father. No one did. His father was alive. Perez confessed to a crime that didn’t even happen.
Thompson said police all across the country use the same tactics or techniques because they’re what have been taught for decades.
One of the most well-known, widely-used strategies for interrogation practices is the Reid Technique. It was developed in the 1970s by John Reid, a former police officer.
“The Reid Technique is the most effective way to develop a guilty person’s frame of mind where they decide to tell the truth about what they’ve done,” said Joe Buckley, President of John Reid and Associates.
The interrogation portion of the Reid Technique follows nine steps. Step three, called handling denials, is where it says investigators can respond by introducing evidence of a suspect’s guilt, real or not, though it says almost always it will be “actual evidence.”
The company goes on to state on its website, “it is not accurate to portray the Reid Technique as being centered around incriminating evidence, real or fictitious.”
Criticism has grown against the Reid Technique in recent years. An article published on the FBI’s website said Reid Technique-trained investigators are sometimes “…unaware of the psychological impact of their approach, as well as their own potential biases.”
A number of other researchers including Professor Saul Kassin, Richard A. Leo, Timothy E. Moore and C. Lindsay Fitzsimmons all call the technique “guilt presumptive.”
But that criticism hasn’t changed the fact that departments all over the country sign up for Reid training. The group’s website shows upcoming sessions from Missouri to Hawaii—Louisiana to Texas and Michigan—among dozens of others.
Buckley says the criticism against Reid isn’t warranted because he argues it’s when investigators don’t follow Reid’s guidelines that they run into problems.
“In terms of it being guilt-presumptive, we interrogate people who we believe, based on the evidence of the case, committed the crime. We don’t interrogate people who we think are innocent. That would be ridiculous,” Buckley said.
When asked if that should change given the fact that there’s proof innocent people do end up in interrogation rooms and do confess to crimes they didn’t commit, Buckley responded, “Well, when you look at the circumstances, it’s not the guilt presumptive, it’s the what the investigators do. When you interrogate somebody for 17 hours and then the person confesses, the reliability of that confession is minimal at best.”
Buckley said Reid are guided by the fact courts continue to accept confessions made using their methods, not the social psychologists who criticize it.
“We’ve had plenty of social psychologists tell us what we should do or not do, there’s no question about that. And most of what they suggest we reject,” he said.
Some experts say Reid alone cannot be blamed for the tactics police use that lead to false confessions. And in the case of Thomas Perez who confessed to a killing that never happened, the Fontana Police Department said it has no records of dealing with Reid and Associates.
Zarowsky said she’s seen examples from departments all over the country that are using deception in interrogations and has never heard of the Reid technique. “And so, we’re not just talking about a formal policy that needs to change. It really needs to get deeper into the culture of law enforcement departments,” Zarowsky said.
For the past four years, Zarowsky has tried to get a law passed in Washington state to eliminate deception by police and change the culture with new, alternative training. Amanda Knox has joined that fight
“I believe if I had not been lied to by police, none of this would have ever happened,” Knox said before a legislative committee on the topic in Olympia, WA.
The bill has never made it to the floor for a vote, in part because it doesn’t have support from the people directly affected by it: Police
“Sometimes the use of deception is required to locate the truth - both to convict and to exonerate people,” said James McMann at that same committee hearing. McMann is the policy director for the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs.
Some states have passed legislation barring police from lying to juveniles. But the proposed legislation in Washington state would be the first to make it apply to adults.
Knox said that’s crucial, especially considering she was an adult when she made her false confession.
“We can do better, we know how to do better, and I will keep fighting until it is done,” Knox said.
Other countries have moved away from using interrogations to get confessions to instead using them to find more information. It’s called the PEACE Technique. It’s a 5-step approach where “interviewers are encouraged to be fair and open-minded and to pursue reliable, true and accurate information.” Some experts say it’s as effective as the Reid Technique in getting confessions from the guilty.
The legislation proposed in Washington state will be proposed again next year in the 2026 session. That will be its fifth attempt at becoming law."
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://www.investigatetv.com/2025/03/24/amanda-knox-calls-ban-police-lying-suspects-during-interrogation/
