With few academic explorations, police interviews are surrounded by myths that are cultured by television and film rather than real cases and analysis using tools such as conversation analysis (CA). Carter's (2005) study addresses this issue and draws upon extracts from 150 cases from England and Wales and investigates the use of laughter by suspects and police officers in the institutional context. She concluded that basic laughter is "uniform across participants" such as in response to "a ridiculous comment in the prior turn". However on a secondary level, laughter is a tool that can be directed towards different objectives. She argues that the suspect uses laughter to challenge the interviewer and reinforce their statements veracity …show more content…
Unlike Television shows where attention is mostly concentrated on confessions, Carter's data highlights the fact that less than 5% of her 150 samples (taken over three years) include any form of a confession showing that despite the police officer's emphasis that the interview is source of confession it is rare to actually obtain one. Thus, rather than treating confession as the primary goal of the interview whuch puts the rights of the suspect at risk, it should be an open-ended session where the goal is to acquire evidence to bolster the case and not to presume guilt. CA is an analytic procedure normally reserved for ordinary talk, a point which Carter calls attention to, but then neglects to comment further on whether analytuc procedures can be fully appropriate for use on police interviews. Furthermore, due to the indiviualistic nature of CA are her views ever objective? as one author's interpretations of laughters functions and meanings are inevitably subjective. Despite these shortcomings, her analyses suggests that more research, preferably using more objective methods, are worthwhile. Carter's results can be easily applied by practitioners and demonstrates the utility of CA within the blossoming field and builds upon previous studies by Heydon (2005), Edwards (2008) and Stokoe (2009a, 2009b). However, she uses a very focussed and narrow domain of CA and those such as Heritage (2012) argues the analysis "falls prey to sequentialism".
The Reid Technique is the most widely adopted interrogation method used by branches of law enforcement, the military, government entities, as well as private enterprises. To say that it is the unchallenged gold standard would be an understatement, and understandably so. If the main goal of an interrogation is to win a confession from the accused, then there is no greater tool. According to Reid’s own marketing propaganda, 95% Reid-trained survey respondents indicated that their confession rate improved when using the Reid Technique. More than half of them stated that their confession rate increased by more than 25% and nearly a quarter of them said it increased by
“It is difficult to prove a causal relationship between permissible investigative and interrogatory deception and testimonial deception. Police freely admit to deceiving suspects and defendants. They do not admit to perjury, much less to the rationalization of perjury. There is evidence, however of the acceptability of perjury as a means to the end of conviction. The evidence is limited and fragmentary and is certainly not dispositive” (Skolnick, 1982).
Many of today’s interrogation models being utilized in police investigations have an impact on false confessions. The model that has been in the public eye recently is the social psychological process model of interrogation known as the “The Reid Technique.” There are two alternatives used by the police today to replace the Reid Technique, one is the PEACE Model and the other is Cognitive Interviewing. These methods are not interrogation techniques like Reid but interview processes.
Confessions have become one of the most valued pieces of evidence in the criminal justice system. What many people, including jurors, may not know is that the process to obtain a confession can vary greatly. Many confessions can be coerced by very abnormal and dangerous situations. A prime example of a suggestive interrogation with a false confession comes from the documentary titled Murder on a Sunday Morning. Alongside, the analysis of the confession given in this documentary will be the critical analysis of three separate academic articles with findings that could have better served the defendant of this case.
Renegotiation of reality occurs when, by virtue of the institutionalized process of police interrogations, the suspect perceives that his initial reality holds no value to the interrogator or to the outcome of the interrogation, when he lacks agency to defend his reality, and when there is no other option. In this paper, I will illustrate how each of these factors facilitates false confessions and will use the Norfolk Four case as my vehicle for exploration and analysis.
To develop an experimental paradigm to study the influence of psychologically based interrogation techniques on true and false confessions.
When questioning witnesses of a crime, detectives may choose a specific technique; one technique is the Reid Technique. The Reid Technique is a multi-step questioning method that pressures the witnesses or the accused to admit to the crime. It is used in North America. According to Professor Brent Snook, a psychologist at the Memorial University in Newfoundland, the Reid Technique is “Starsky and Hutch”, where two hot head detectives “beat up” their suspects to encourage them confess (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/11/25/youre-guilty-now-confess-false-admissions-put-polices-favourite-interrogation-tactic-under-scrutiny/). This paper will examine the steps of the Reid Technique, as well as reveal substantial evidence that this technique should be banned. This technique has led to false confessions. Not only does this mean that someone has been punished that isn’t guilty, but it also means the real criminal has not been found and punished. The arguments against the use of this technique are the following:
Police interrogate suspects on a daily basis, but how can they tell if the confession is real? We have all heard, at one time or another of someone confessing to a crime they didn’t commit. Then your next thought is “I would never confess to something I didn’t do”. The only way you can be a 100% sure of that is if you have been through an interrogation before. This paper is going to define “confession” and tell how an innocent person will confesses to a crime they didn’t commit. This paper will also show the history of interrogations.
Once introduced as evidence, a confession causes a negative chain reaction in the justice system and law enforcers and justice officials often include their biases in their judgment, which leads to justice miscarriage. The process of false confession starts with the law enforcement officials (Leo & Davis, 2011). According to Kassin, Meissner, and ReNorwick (2005), investigators have a high confidence in knowing a true confession but their accuracy is the same as that of the public. The investigators do not see deception but rather they infer
In this article, Richard Leo examines false confession cases, investigating the wonder of false confessions, the effect of confessional proof, and the reasons for false confessions. Police interrogations can be intimidating to people who are in desperate situations. Some people are bullied into making false confessions and end up getting convicted, even though they are innocent. If the Court convicts someone using testimonies and confessions, the defendant didn’t get the right to a fair trial.
This particular study is captivating because it narrows down the causes of wrongful convictions of innocent people, whether it’s the interrogators applying inappropriate methods of the Reid Technique, such as misclassification, coercion, psychological manipulation, and contamination. (Orlando) “The Reid Technique of interrogation consists of essentially three steps. Custody and isolation (i.e., the suspect is detained and isolated, anxiety and uncertainty are generated in order to weaken resistance). Confrontation (i.e., the suspect 's guilt is assumed and he or she is confronted with alleged incriminating evidence that may or may not be genuine; denials are rejected, even if they happen to be true, and the consequence of continued denial is emphasized), and minimization (i.e., the interrogator tries to gain the suspect 's trust and provides face-saving excuses for the crime, including suggesting that it was an accident or that the victim deserved it) (…) During the interrogation the investigators use tactics of imbedding trust to lure detainees to comply and achieve a legal outcome which could lead to reducing longer sentencing if the detainee confesses. Also if there are multiple co-perpetrators investigators look to probe the detainee that someone has cast blame on the individual, so therefore they must engage with the police and own up to their part in the crime (Douglas & Rita). The Reid Technique not only is it used illegitimately but it placing innocent individuals
The Reid Model of Interrogation has been criticised because it allows police officers to coerce false confessions from suspects. The coerced interrogation can lead to false confessions because the suspect wants to escape the stress inducing interrogation and they want to avoid the threatened punishment. The Reid Model also exploits suspects who are “psychologically vulnerable, intellectually disabled or have a history of substance abuse”. (Murie). Officers try to manipulate the suspect by falsely claiming to know the suspect is guilty, allege the crime is already solved and threaten harsh punishments. The Reid Technique therefore encourages dishonesty on the part of interrogators. The officers assume that the suspect is guilty until proven
Within the recently developed field of forensic psychology, research has been conducted to examine the psychological effects of investigator bias on the criminal suspect. This heightened inclination to confess to a crime regardless of guilt or innocence has been supported by Meissner and Kassin (2004) who concluded that interrogators go into the interrogation room with the perceived notion that the suspect is guilty, suggesting that the interrogator is simply working to achieve a confirmatory hypothesis that guilt is the correct verdict. To further illuminate the extent of this issue, Reed (2015) reported a study conducted by Michael Radelet and Hugo Bedau where they analyzed three-hundred and fifty cases and found that forty-nine of them led
Almost everyone who has seen a cop television show or movie has heard the saying “You have the right to remain silent”. In America, people are raised to believe that the justice system never fails, and that no matter what happens justice will always prevail, though for some people this safety net has failed them. Since the late 1980s six studies have documented 250 interrogation-induced false confessions. Police-induced false confessions are the result of multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance. Imagine that a solider of the U.S. military is brought in for questioning, kept locked up for sixteen hours in an interrogation room, constantly threatened with the death penalty if they did not confess to the crime, and the whole time left without representation. In 1997 this was the case for four individuals from Norfolk, Virginia held without representation and forced to give false confessions.
n the last few years a great deal has been written about the police mentality. If we can believe everything we read in magazines, journals, and sociology books, the typical policeman is cynical, suspicious, conservative, and thoroughly bigoted. This is not a flattering picture to be sure, but it recurs again and again in the popular and "scientific" literature on the police'.