PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Once modern psychology took hold, criticisms of the Reid Technique came fast and furious. m Buckley told me the technique is popular “because A) It protects the innocent, and B) It is a successful process to create an environment where the guilty person admits what they’ve done, all in accordance with the guidelines that the courts have established.” But detractors argue the Reid Technique sets police up to commit mistakes. Investigators can mischaracterize an innocent person as guilty; next — presuming guilt — they may use fake evidence and accuse him of committing the crime, peppering their remarks throughout with promises and threats. Then, building off the grains of a flawed confession, they build a fictitious sand castle of guilt."
----------------------------------
PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "One researcher called the Reid Technique a “psychological pressure cooker, as its reliance on psychological manipulation, presumption of guilt and intimidation leads to suspects feeling extreme distress, putting vulnerable individuals at further risk.” Another study found the Reid Technique “too powerful” because it “can break down the innocent as well as the guilty.” One main criticism is that once questioning begins, the interviewer has already concluded the suspect is guilty, and there’s no going back. By that point, police are single-mindedly focused on securing a confession. Another problem is that its goal is to obtain a confession rather than solve the crime. This turns the investigator into a “thug or trickster whose function is to cajole or to wheedle a confession from an unwilling suspect,” according to experts. And it turns out that police can be bad at spotting liars."
-------------------------------------------
PASSAGE THREE OF THE DAY: "Some parts of the country have begun chipping away at the Reid edifice. In 2021, Illinois and Oregon banned the police from lying to juvenile suspects. A Montana ruling found “lying to (a) defendant about how much is known about his involvement in the crimes is particularly repulsive to and totally incompatible with the concepts of due process embedded in the federal and state constitutions.” Hawaii has found that misrepresenting evidence may make a confession involuntary. Here in Nebraska, State Sen. John Cavanaugh has twice introduced a bill to ban police from deceiving juveniles during interrogation."
----------------------------------------------
STORY: "A famed police interrogation technique led to infamous false confessions in Nebraska," by J.J. Harder, published by The Flatware Free Press, on July 9, 2026. (A graduate of UNL’s journalism school, J.J. Harder worked as a food critic, opinion columnist and television reporter before becoming a U.S. diplomat. Over his 19 years at the State Department, he served in Mexico, Morocco, Peru, South Africa and Syria.)
SUB-HEADING: "A body of research now suggests that the Reid Technique, first popularized when used in a 1955 Lincoln homicide investigation, can prompt false confessions from suspects. Law enforcement leaders say its continued use is one tool of many in an investigator’s toolbelt."
Darrel Parker clocked out of his job as the City of Lincoln’s first forester and walked through the door of his Antelope Park home for lunch on Dec. 14, 1955.
He was probably expecting a delicious meal. His 22-year-old wife, Nancy, developed pasta recipes for the Gooch Milling Company and had appeared on a local television cooking show.
What he didn’t expect was to find her dead body — mouth stuffed with his own handkerchiefs, hands and neck tied up with cords.
After a week with few leads, the Lincoln Police Department brought in a heavy hitter from Chicago, a former cop just beginning to be known for his ability to extract confessions like blood from a stone: John Reid.
Sitting knee to knee in a windowless room with his face a foot from Parker’s, Reid stroked the man’s head as if he were an animal, suggested his wife was cheating on him and threatened the electric chair. If the starved and exhausted Parker dropped his head or turned away, Reid would pull his chin up or jerk his head back, according to court records.
After 12 hours of questioning and polygraphs, Parker finally told Reid he had raped and killed his wife. The slaying blew up from a local cold case to a national sensation. Based almost solely on his confession, Parker would get life in prison; Reid would go on to become the most famous interrogator in U.S. history.
Thanks to what transpired in Lincoln a few days before Christmas in 1955, the controversial Reid Technique would dominate the next 70 years of interrogations in the U.S. and beyond. In interviews with the Flatwater Free Press, law enforcement groups in Nebraska defended using it as an effective tool, essentially one of many in an investigator’s toolbelt.
But there’s also growing evidence that the famed technique often fingers innocent people.
The Reid Technique is a simple three-step dance: a review of the facts, a behavior analysis interview and an interrogation.
First, police examine evidence from the scene and what they know about the suspects: their whereabouts, would-be motivation, socioeconomic details, reputation.
In the interview, police ask non-accusatory questions to fix a baseline for how the suspects respond; they gauge tone, mannerisms, pitch, gesticulations.
Then, in the final stage, the interrogators can pull out the cartoon sledgehammer: They bluff that they have evidence that proves the suspect’s guilt. They buddy up to the suspect by sympathetically justifying the crime but then hit them with a binary question whose alternatives both presuppose guilt, à la “Had you been planning it for a while or did you decide just in the moment?”
The technique, famously pioneered in Nebraska, often leads to a police interrogator forcing his boxed-in suspect to relate details of the crime, which they then put into writing as a confession.
“Innocence is not an option,” says one researcher critical of the Reid Technique. “Resistance is futile.”
***
Today, the third degree is what your spouse gives you when you come home late. Until the late 1920s, police unable to obtain confessions could resort to what they called the third degree: secretly and illegally hitting, kicking and burning suspects. Denying them food. Shoving their heads in toilets. Forcing them to walk on mats juiced with electricity.
After Great Depression-era government reform efforts and Supreme Court decisions, it became clear that the old methods had to go.
Police sought to replace violence with psychology when syringing admissions of guilt out of reticent suspects.
Experts rushed to establish new protocols that police could use in the field.
Lawyer and criminologist Fred Inbau, who at Northwestern University had helped create one of the country’s first crime labs, published in 1942 what became the most influential interrogation manual. Reid, a recent DePaul law grad, joined Inbau’s team shortly thereafter, and they co-authored the handbook’s 1953 edition.
After nearly a decade of more research and propelled by the fame from the Parker case, they published Criminal Interrogations and Confessions, which the New York Times called “the undisputed bible of police interrogation.”
Today, John E. Reid & Associates, the company still selling the eponymous method more than 70 years after it was used on Darrel Parker, says that “the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation® is now the most widely used approach to question subjects in the world.”
A nationwide survey found “two-thirds of (police) departments reported ‘most’ or ‘some’ of (their) officers” had been trained in the Reid Technique.
President Joseph Buckley, the second person to lead Reid & Associates, said Reid’s clients also include private security, insurance and credit card fraud investigators and corporations’ loss prevention teams.
Once modern psychology took hold, criticisms of the Reid Technique came fast and furious.
Buckley told me the technique is popular “because A) It protects the innocent, and B) It is a successful process to create an environment where the guilty person admits what they’ve done, all in accordance with the guidelines that the courts have established.”
But detractors argue the Reid Technique sets police up to commit mistakes. Investigators can mischaracterize an innocent person as guilty; next — presuming guilt — they may use fake evidence and accuse him of committing the crime, peppering their remarks throughout with promises and threats. Then, building off the grains of a flawed confession, they build a fictitious sand castle of guilt.
One researcher called the Reid Technique a “psychological pressure cooker, as its reliance on psychological manipulation, presumption of guilt and intimidation leads to suspects feeling extreme distress, putting vulnerable individuals at further risk.” Another study found the Reid Technique “too powerful” because it “can break down the innocent as well as the guilty.”
One main criticism is that once questioning begins, the interviewer has already concluded the suspect is guilty, and there’s no going back. By that point, police are single-mindedly focused on securing a confession.
Another problem is that its goal is to obtain a confession rather than solve the crime. This turns the investigator into a “thug or trickster whose function is to cajole or to wheedle a confession from an unwilling suspect,” according to experts.
And it turns out that police can be bad at spotting liars.
The Reid Technique tells cops that a suspect who avoids eye contact, slouches or shifts in his chair, touches his nose or chews his nails is lying. And an uncooperative or cagey subject must be guilty. Nearly a half-century of research says this is “folk psychology … complete bunk,” criminologist Richard Leo told Flatwater. By focusing on physical behavior — and thus downplaying the information the suspect is actually relaying — the interrogator becomes more and more convinced he’s across from the culprit.
Some studies have found police interrogators cannot reliably distinguish between truthful and false denials of guilt at levels greater than chance. One landmark study ranks the so-called experts at no better than the average person at detecting lies; another said it may actually be “counterproductive as a method of distinguishing truth and deception.” A 2020 study went for the gut punch: “Using his own technique, Mr. Reid could not accurately determine whether a suspect was truthful or lying.”
The Christmas stocking of U.S. police history is stuffed with false confessions, going back to at least the 1692 Salem witch trials. Rather than using proto-waterboarding seesaws, Reid practitioners play law enforcement mind games: Legal researcher Wyatt Kozinski said that “in a dynamic akin to Stockholm Syndrome, the suspect is nudged into believing that the interrogator is his friend.”
Leo concluded that “a false confession is the most incriminating and persuasive false evidence of guilt that the State can bring against a defendant.” Both judges and juries overwhelmingly find confessions to be more of a smoking gun than an actual smoking gun.
Nearly 30% of DNA exonerees in the U.S. since 1989 have falsely confessed; most did so in response to Reid-wielding police, according to law enforcement consulting group Wicklander-Zulawski.
Academics note that wrongful convictions don’t just incarcerate the innocent: They may lead to more than 41,000 often preventable crimes, because a closed case on an innocent confessor means a potentially reoffending perpetrator remains at large. And they cost taxpayers money, too. The estimated annual cost of imprisoning a person, innocent or guilty, is $65,000, and that number rises considerably if a jurisdiction must pay out damages to an exonerated person.
Earlier this year, a law professor used the Reid Technique to successfully convince Chat GPT it committed a crime it couldn’t possibly have committed.
The Reid Technique particularly increases false confessions for two vulnerable populations: juveniles and people with mental process issues. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than a third of exonerated minors and more than three quarters of exonerated minors under age 14 falsely confessed; the younger the suspect, the more likely the confession is false. Juveniles’ less-developed brains impair their judgment and decision-making skills. Minors often confess in order to end the interrogation; they incorrectly wager they can sort things out later.
According to a National Registry of Exonerations report, 72% of exonerees with mental processing issues made false confessions, compared with 9% of exonerees with no disability.
Some parts of the country have begun chipping away at the Reid edifice. In 2021, Illinois and Oregon banned the police from lying to juvenile suspects. A Montana ruling found “lying to (a) defendant about how much is known about his involvement in the crimes is particularly repulsive to and totally incompatible with the concepts of due process embedded in the federal and state constitutions.” Hawaii has found that misrepresenting evidence may make a confession involuntary.
Here in Nebraska, State Sen. John Cavanaugh has twice introduced a bill to ban police from deceiving juveniles during interrogation. In a 2022 hearing, Omaha police representatives acknowledged that Nebraska’s police lie to suspects. The Omaha Police Officer’s Association’s Jim Maguire downplayed the connection between Reid and false confessions, calling the bill “an attempt to fix a problem that does not exist.” Jennifer Craven, a lawyer now with Crete’s Kalkwarf & Smith, concluded in her 2023 Nebraska Law Review analysis of the Reid Technique and the bills that, “The search for truth should not require lies… The Nebraska Legislature has a responsibility to (ban deceptive interrogations).” Neither bill advanced to a floor vote.
The Parker case isn’t actually Nebraska’s most famous instance of the Reid Technique rendering a false confession. The 1985 killing of 86-year-old Helen Wilson went unsolved for four years until a deputy sheriff built a case around a teenager hearing someone bragging about the slaying.
Five of the so-called Beatrice Six defendants ended up giving false confessions. In 2008, Joseph White, the sixth, convinced a court to allow DNA testing of blood and semen from the crime scene, which led to the group’s exoneration, after collectively serving more than 70 years in prison. The New Yorker called it “the largest DNA exoneration involving false confessions in the history of the American judicial system.”
Reid and Miranda
Controversy over the Reid Technique cuts to a deeper problem of detainees’ rights. The famous 1966 Miranda v. Arizona case — often touted as a civil rights victory — blessed police falsely telling suspects their fingerprints were found at the crime scene. The case cites the Reid Technique 10 times — never in a positive light — implying it is third degree-adjacent; it says the technique “trades on the weakness of individuals” as a reason why police must read suspects’ their rights.
Three years later, the Supreme Court affirmed the police’s right to lie to suspects during interrogations. Police may legally say a codefendant ratted him out or eyewitnesses placed him at the scene — complete fabrications. As Reid critic Saul Kassin told The Marshall Project, “Once you start down the road of using trickery and deception, the misuses are inherent in that. There are no clear lines of, ‘This is a good amount of trickery, and this isn’t.’”
Miranda focuses on informing a suspect of his rights.
Innocent suspects underestimate their Miranda rights because they embody a “phenomenology of innocence — a naive faith in the exculpatory power of their own innocence,” according to researcher Saul Kassin. More than four-fifths of suspects waive their Miranda rights.
Reid’s stranglehold has been slowly loosening for decades. For a quarter century, English police, rather than seeking confessions, have been using a method that has them ask open-ended questions and then pinpoint inconsistencies that overwhelm a liar.
Canadian police have adopted the nonconfrontational “cognitive interview” to similarly encourage the subject to narrate at length — without confession as the goal. Research on the Strategic Use of Evidence technique shows that suspects who do not know about the evidence against them are more likely to give statements contradicting that evidence. The suspect gets dinged on inconsistencies, alerting investigators to deception. Unlike the Reid Technique, non-accusatorial, rapport-based approaches render accurate information.
Even in the Reid-saturated U.S., leading police consulting group Wicklander-Zulawski stopped teaching the Reid Technique almost a decade ago.
The newest research proposes videotaping of all suspect interviews, a science-based model of investigative interviewing, mandated defense attorney presence and limits on confrontational interrogations like Reid. The FBI, the District of Columbia, and 30 states — including Nebraska — now require police to videotape interrogations.
Both the Lincoln Police Department and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office count Reid as tools investigators may use if they have attended optional training. LPD’s Todd Kocian told me that “in some cases, concepts taught in the Reid curriculum are appropriate … The approach to successful communication is ever changing and varies from person to person, topic to topic, incident to incident.”
Capt. Nathan Kovarik of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office says that deputies learn a variety of techniques in the academy, and that a deputy last attended a Reid training about four years ago.
“There might be a time and a place for that in an interview room,” Novarik, a captain with the criminal investigations bureau, said of the Reid Technique. “If it’s used ethically and properly, it probably could elicit some confessions from some suspects.”
Darrel Parker recanted the day after he made his confession, but it was too late. Only in 1969, after 13 years in prison, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the confession had been coerced and ordered a retrial. Prosecutors washed their hands and offered Parker parole; he moved to Iowa and restarted his life.
In 1988, almost a decade into running the parks department in Moline, Illinois, Parker was probably overjoyed to learn about another death: Nebraska death row inmate Wesley Peery, Parker’s colleague who years before had secretly confessed to killing Nancy Parker and 12 other people, suffered a heart attack. Bound by attorney-client privilege, Peery’s lawyers couldn’t tell anyone until after he died. Police had questioned and polygraphed Peery, an ex-con with a long criminal record, before calling in Reid. In Parker’s trial — during which Peery went to prison for raping a woman in Sarpy County — the jury learned Peery’s car was parked in front of the Parker residence the day of the slaying.
The Nebraska Board of Pardons granted Darrel Parker a full pardon in 1991, and — thanks to 2009’s Wrongful Conviction and Imprisonment Act — in 2012 the state gave him half a million dollars, a full exoneration and an apology.
Parker died in 2022, age 90.
It is still legal for police across Nebraska to lie to suspects.""
He was probably expecting a delicious meal. His 22-year-old wife, Nancy, developed pasta recipes for the Gooch Milling Company and had appeared on a local television cooking show.
What he didn’t expect was to find her dead body — mouth stuffed with his own handkerchiefs, hands and neck tied up with cords.
After a week with few leads, the Lincoln Police Department brought in a heavy hitter from Chicago, a former cop just beginning to be known for his ability to extract confessions like blood from a stone: John Reid.
Sitting knee to knee in a windowless room with his face a foot from Parker’s, Reid stroked the man’s head as if he were an animal, suggested his wife was cheating on him and threatened the electric chair. If the starved and exhausted Parker dropped his head or turned away, Reid would pull his chin up or jerk his head back, according to court records.
After 12 hours of questioning and polygraphs, Parker finally told Reid he had raped and killed his wife. The slaying blew up from a local cold case to a national sensation. Based almost solely on his confession, Parker would get life in prison; Reid would go on to become the most famous interrogator in U.S. history.
Thanks to what transpired in Lincoln a few days before Christmas in 1955, the controversial Reid Technique would dominate the next 70 years of interrogations in the U.S. and beyond. In interviews with the Flatwater Free Press, law enforcement groups in Nebraska defended using it as an effective tool, essentially one of many in an investigator’s toolbelt.
But there’s also growing evidence that the famed technique often fingers innocent people.
The Reid Technique is a simple three-step dance: a review of the facts, a behavior analysis interview and an interrogation.
First, police examine evidence from the scene and what they know about the suspects: their whereabouts, would-be motivation, socioeconomic details, reputation.
In the interview, police ask non-accusatory questions to fix a baseline for how the suspects respond; they gauge tone, mannerisms, pitch, gesticulations.
Then, in the final stage, the interrogators can pull out the cartoon sledgehammer: They bluff that they have evidence that proves the suspect’s guilt. They buddy up to the suspect by sympathetically justifying the crime but then hit them with a binary question whose alternatives both presuppose guilt, à la “Had you been planning it for a while or did you decide just in the moment?”
The technique, famously pioneered in Nebraska, often leads to a police interrogator forcing his boxed-in suspect to relate details of the crime, which they then put into writing as a confession.
“Innocence is not an option,” says one researcher critical of the Reid Technique. “Resistance is futile.”
***
Today, the third degree is what your spouse gives you when you come home late. Until the late 1920s, police unable to obtain confessions could resort to what they called the third degree: secretly and illegally hitting, kicking and burning suspects. Denying them food. Shoving their heads in toilets. Forcing them to walk on mats juiced with electricity.
After Great Depression-era government reform efforts and Supreme Court decisions, it became clear that the old methods had to go.
Police sought to replace violence with psychology when syringing admissions of guilt out of reticent suspects.
Experts rushed to establish new protocols that police could use in the field.
Lawyer and criminologist Fred Inbau, who at Northwestern University had helped create one of the country’s first crime labs, published in 1942 what became the most influential interrogation manual. Reid, a recent DePaul law grad, joined Inbau’s team shortly thereafter, and they co-authored the handbook’s 1953 edition.
After nearly a decade of more research and propelled by the fame from the Parker case, they published Criminal Interrogations and Confessions, which the New York Times called “the undisputed bible of police interrogation.”
Today, John E. Reid & Associates, the company still selling the eponymous method more than 70 years after it was used on Darrel Parker, says that “the Reid Technique of Interviewing and Interrogation® is now the most widely used approach to question subjects in the world.”
A nationwide survey found “two-thirds of (police) departments reported ‘most’ or ‘some’ of (their) officers” had been trained in the Reid Technique.
President Joseph Buckley, the second person to lead Reid & Associates, said Reid’s clients also include private security, insurance and credit card fraud investigators and corporations’ loss prevention teams.
Once modern psychology took hold, criticisms of the Reid Technique came fast and furious.
Buckley told me the technique is popular “because A) It protects the innocent, and B) It is a successful process to create an environment where the guilty person admits what they’ve done, all in accordance with the guidelines that the courts have established.”
But detractors argue the Reid Technique sets police up to commit mistakes. Investigators can mischaracterize an innocent person as guilty; next — presuming guilt — they may use fake evidence and accuse him of committing the crime, peppering their remarks throughout with promises and threats. Then, building off the grains of a flawed confession, they build a fictitious sand castle of guilt.
One researcher called the Reid Technique a “psychological pressure cooker, as its reliance on psychological manipulation, presumption of guilt and intimidation leads to suspects feeling extreme distress, putting vulnerable individuals at further risk.” Another study found the Reid Technique “too powerful” because it “can break down the innocent as well as the guilty.”
One main criticism is that once questioning begins, the interviewer has already concluded the suspect is guilty, and there’s no going back. By that point, police are single-mindedly focused on securing a confession.
Another problem is that its goal is to obtain a confession rather than solve the crime. This turns the investigator into a “thug or trickster whose function is to cajole or to wheedle a confession from an unwilling suspect,” according to experts.
And it turns out that police can be bad at spotting liars.
The Reid Technique tells cops that a suspect who avoids eye contact, slouches or shifts in his chair, touches his nose or chews his nails is lying. And an uncooperative or cagey subject must be guilty. Nearly a half-century of research says this is “folk psychology … complete bunk,” criminologist Richard Leo told Flatwater. By focusing on physical behavior — and thus downplaying the information the suspect is actually relaying — the interrogator becomes more and more convinced he’s across from the culprit.
Some studies have found police interrogators cannot reliably distinguish between truthful and false denials of guilt at levels greater than chance. One landmark study ranks the so-called experts at no better than the average person at detecting lies; another said it may actually be “counterproductive as a method of distinguishing truth and deception.” A 2020 study went for the gut punch: “Using his own technique, Mr. Reid could not accurately determine whether a suspect was truthful or lying.”
The Christmas stocking of U.S. police history is stuffed with false confessions, going back to at least the 1692 Salem witch trials. Rather than using proto-waterboarding seesaws, Reid practitioners play law enforcement mind games: Legal researcher Wyatt Kozinski said that “in a dynamic akin to Stockholm Syndrome, the suspect is nudged into believing that the interrogator is his friend.”
Leo concluded that “a false confession is the most incriminating and persuasive false evidence of guilt that the State can bring against a defendant.” Both judges and juries overwhelmingly find confessions to be more of a smoking gun than an actual smoking gun.
Nearly 30% of DNA exonerees in the U.S. since 1989 have falsely confessed; most did so in response to Reid-wielding police, according to law enforcement consulting group Wicklander-Zulawski.
Academics note that wrongful convictions don’t just incarcerate the innocent: They may lead to more than 41,000 often preventable crimes, because a closed case on an innocent confessor means a potentially reoffending perpetrator remains at large. And they cost taxpayers money, too. The estimated annual cost of imprisoning a person, innocent or guilty, is $65,000, and that number rises considerably if a jurisdiction must pay out damages to an exonerated person.
Earlier this year, a law professor used the Reid Technique to successfully convince Chat GPT it committed a crime it couldn’t possibly have committed.
The Reid Technique particularly increases false confessions for two vulnerable populations: juveniles and people with mental process issues. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than a third of exonerated minors and more than three quarters of exonerated minors under age 14 falsely confessed; the younger the suspect, the more likely the confession is false. Juveniles’ less-developed brains impair their judgment and decision-making skills. Minors often confess in order to end the interrogation; they incorrectly wager they can sort things out later.
According to a National Registry of Exonerations report, 72% of exonerees with mental processing issues made false confessions, compared with 9% of exonerees with no disability.
Some parts of the country have begun chipping away at the Reid edifice. In 2021, Illinois and Oregon banned the police from lying to juvenile suspects. A Montana ruling found “lying to (a) defendant about how much is known about his involvement in the crimes is particularly repulsive to and totally incompatible with the concepts of due process embedded in the federal and state constitutions.” Hawaii has found that misrepresenting evidence may make a confession involuntary.
Here in Nebraska, State Sen. John Cavanaugh has twice introduced a bill to ban police from deceiving juveniles during interrogation. In a 2022 hearing, Omaha police representatives acknowledged that Nebraska’s police lie to suspects. The Omaha Police Officer’s Association’s Jim Maguire downplayed the connection between Reid and false confessions, calling the bill “an attempt to fix a problem that does not exist.” Jennifer Craven, a lawyer now with Crete’s Kalkwarf & Smith, concluded in her 2023 Nebraska Law Review analysis of the Reid Technique and the bills that, “The search for truth should not require lies… The Nebraska Legislature has a responsibility to (ban deceptive interrogations).” Neither bill advanced to a floor vote.
The Parker case isn’t actually Nebraska’s most famous instance of the Reid Technique rendering a false confession. The 1985 killing of 86-year-old Helen Wilson went unsolved for four years until a deputy sheriff built a case around a teenager hearing someone bragging about the slaying.
Five of the so-called Beatrice Six defendants ended up giving false confessions. In 2008, Joseph White, the sixth, convinced a court to allow DNA testing of blood and semen from the crime scene, which led to the group’s exoneration, after collectively serving more than 70 years in prison. The New Yorker called it “the largest DNA exoneration involving false confessions in the history of the American judicial system.”
Reid and Miranda
Controversy over the Reid Technique cuts to a deeper problem of detainees’ rights. The famous 1966 Miranda v. Arizona case — often touted as a civil rights victory — blessed police falsely telling suspects their fingerprints were found at the crime scene. The case cites the Reid Technique 10 times — never in a positive light — implying it is third degree-adjacent; it says the technique “trades on the weakness of individuals” as a reason why police must read suspects’ their rights.
Three years later, the Supreme Court affirmed the police’s right to lie to suspects during interrogations. Police may legally say a codefendant ratted him out or eyewitnesses placed him at the scene — complete fabrications. As Reid critic Saul Kassin told The Marshall Project, “Once you start down the road of using trickery and deception, the misuses are inherent in that. There are no clear lines of, ‘This is a good amount of trickery, and this isn’t.’”
Miranda focuses on informing a suspect of his rights.
Innocent suspects underestimate their Miranda rights because they embody a “phenomenology of innocence — a naive faith in the exculpatory power of their own innocence,” according to researcher Saul Kassin. More than four-fifths of suspects waive their Miranda rights.
Reid’s stranglehold has been slowly loosening for decades. For a quarter century, English police, rather than seeking confessions, have been using a method that has them ask open-ended questions and then pinpoint inconsistencies that overwhelm a liar.
Canadian police have adopted the nonconfrontational “cognitive interview” to similarly encourage the subject to narrate at length — without confession as the goal. Research on the Strategic Use of Evidence technique shows that suspects who do not know about the evidence against them are more likely to give statements contradicting that evidence. The suspect gets dinged on inconsistencies, alerting investigators to deception. Unlike the Reid Technique, non-accusatorial, rapport-based approaches render accurate information.
Even in the Reid-saturated U.S., leading police consulting group Wicklander-Zulawski stopped teaching the Reid Technique almost a decade ago.
The newest research proposes videotaping of all suspect interviews, a science-based model of investigative interviewing, mandated defense attorney presence and limits on confrontational interrogations like Reid. The FBI, the District of Columbia, and 30 states — including Nebraska — now require police to videotape interrogations.
Both the Lincoln Police Department and the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office count Reid as tools investigators may use if they have attended optional training. LPD’s Todd Kocian told me that “in some cases, concepts taught in the Reid curriculum are appropriate … The approach to successful communication is ever changing and varies from person to person, topic to topic, incident to incident.”
Capt. Nathan Kovarik of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office says that deputies learn a variety of techniques in the academy, and that a deputy last attended a Reid training about four years ago.
“There might be a time and a place for that in an interview room,” Novarik, a captain with the criminal investigations bureau, said of the Reid Technique. “If it’s used ethically and properly, it probably could elicit some confessions from some suspects.”
Darrel Parker recanted the day after he made his confession, but it was too late. Only in 1969, after 13 years in prison, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the confession had been coerced and ordered a retrial. Prosecutors washed their hands and offered Parker parole; he moved to Iowa and restarted his life.
In 1988, almost a decade into running the parks department in Moline, Illinois, Parker was probably overjoyed to learn about another death: Nebraska death row inmate Wesley Peery, Parker’s colleague who years before had secretly confessed to killing Nancy Parker and 12 other people, suffered a heart attack. Bound by attorney-client privilege, Peery’s lawyers couldn’t tell anyone until after he died. Police had questioned and polygraphed Peery, an ex-con with a long criminal record, before calling in Reid. In Parker’s trial — during which Peery went to prison for raping a woman in Sarpy County — the jury learned Peery’s car was parked in front of the Parker residence the day of the slaying.
The Nebraska Board of Pardons granted Darrel Parker a full pardon in 1991, and — thanks to 2009’s Wrongful Conviction and Imprisonment Act — in 2012 the state gave him half a million dollars, a full exoneration and an apology.
Parker died in 2022, age 90.
It is still legal for police across Nebraska to lie to suspects.""
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project; FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true;
