"Brooklyn
Law School brought in a pair of psychology professors and a member of
the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary for a Continuing Legal Education
(CLE) ethics roundtable on police interrogations in Downtown Brooklyn on
Thursday....Tonight is obviously the capstone of this project.” This part of the series was titled "Getting a Confession Versus
Getting at the Truth: An Ethical Alternative to Deceptive Police
Interrogation Tactics."......... During the two-hour roundtable, professor Saul Kassin from John Jay College described the current
models used for interrogation in the U.S., focusing on one called the
Reid Technique, and explained why they're outdated. “U.S. interrogations cause innocent people to confess,” Kassin
said. “Not everybody who gives a false confession does it because of the
process of police interrogation, but most do. It's a pervasive problem
and far more so than anyone ever anticipated.” “Everything is wrong with the Reid Technique,” Kassin added. Kassin claimed that false confessions are responsible for more
than 25 percent of the 330 post-conviction DNA exonerations handled by
the Innocence Project. He warned that many people are susceptible to
false confessions and noted the famous case of Marty Tankleff, a Long
Island man falsely convicted of killing his parents, to point out that
being innocent can actually work against a suspect during an
interrogation.
“Innocent people tend to have a belief that justice will
prevail, so they think that if they just say what investigators want to
hear, then they can get out and they’ll prove their innocence later,”
Kassin said. After pointing out why the current techniques
are faulty, Snook
and Barron went on to explain a better model, specifically the PEACE
model (Preparation and Planning, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure
and Evaluation and Feedback). The main difference, they explained, was
that the Reid Technique starts with the presumption of guilt and PEACE
is more about fact finding and evidence based on empirical techniques.
“In this model there is no coercion, there are no monologues,
there is no deception [or] detection; there is nothing other than
pulling out information in the most reliable and accurate way as
possible,” Snook said.
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2015/10/2/brooklyn-law-school-cle-seminar-examines-false-confessions-explores-better-way
See the Reid Technique response to allegations made in another post on this Blog:
"The Reid technique;
Joseph Buckley, President of Reid and Associates, responds to a recent
post by Ottawa criminal lawyer Solomon Friedman centered around a
commentary published in the Ottawa Citizen headed "Reid it and weep -
coercive interrogations the norm in Canada."""
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-reid-technique-joseph-buckley.html