Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [69]
The bible of interrogation methods is Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, written by Fred E. Inbau, John E. Reid, Joseph P. Buckley, and Brian C. Jayne. John E. Reid and Associates offers training programs, seminars, and videotapes on the 9-Step Reid Technique, and on their Web site they claim that they have trained more than 300,000 law-enforcement workers in the most effective ways of eliciting confessions. The manual starts right off reassuring readers that “none of the steps is apt to make an innocent person confess, and that all the steps are legally as well as morally justifiable”26:
It is our clear position that merely introducing fictitious evidence during an interrogation would not cause an innocent person to confess. It is absurd to believe that a suspect who knows he did not commit a crime would place greater weight and credibility on alleged evidence than his own knowledge of his innocence. Under this circumstance, the natural human reaction would be one of anger and mistrust toward the investigator. The net effect would be the suspect’s further resolution to maintain his innocence.27
Wrong. The “natural human reaction” is usually not anger and mistrust but confusion and hopelessness—dissonance—because most innocent suspects trust the investigator not to lie to them. The interrogator, however, is biased from the start. Whereas an interview is a conversation designed to get general information from a person, an interrogation is designed to get a suspect to admit guilt. (The suspect is often unaware of the difference.) The manual states this explicitly: “An interrogation is conducted only when the investigator is reasonably certain of the suspect’s guilt.” The danger of that attitude is that once the investigator is “reasonably certain,” the suspect cannot dislodge that certainty. On the contrary, anything the suspect does will be interpreted as evidence of lying, denial, and evading the truth, including repeated claims of innocence. Interrogators are explicitly instructed to think this way. They are taught to adopt the attitude “Don’t lie; we know you are guilty,” and to reject the suspect’s denials. We’ve seen this self-justifying loop before, in the way some therapists and social workers interview children they believe have been molested. Once an interrogation like this has begun, there is no such thing as disconfirming evidence.28
Promulgators of the Reid Technique have an intuitive understanding of how dissonance works (at least in other people). They realize that if a suspect is given the chance to protest his innocence, he will have made a public commitment and it will be harder for him to back down and later admit guilt. “The more the suspect denies his involvement,” writes Louis Senese, vice president of Reid and Associates, “the more difficult it becomes for him to admit that he committed the crime”—precisely, because of dissonance. Therefore, Senese advises interrogators to be prepared for the suspect’s denials and head them off at the pass. Interrogators, he says, should watch for nonverbal signs that the suspect is about to deny culpability (“holding his hand up or shaking his head no or making eye contact”), and if the suspect says, straight out, “Could I say something?,” interrogators should respond with a command, using