Analysis Of The Reid Technique

The Reid technique is a commonly used police interrogation technique in North America (King & Snook, 2009). This interrogation technique is used to elicit confessions from people suspected of committing a criminal offense. The Reid technique requires that police officers collect factual evidence, then the interviewer questions the suspect in a non-accusatory manner (King & Snook, 2009). Truth or deception is then determined based on behavioural analysis of the suspect, then if deception is detected a 9-step psychological approach from the Reid technique is applied (King & Snook, 2009). However, interrogators often apply this technique as the first step without any physical evidence, where they coerce their suspect to incriminate themselves
They found that the use of the maximization and minimization technique compromises the interrogation process and increases the likelihood of eliciting a false confession (Russano, et al., 2005) This support the argument that using false evidence against innocent people causes them to internalize the blame for the act which increases their risk to confess (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). The study also found that a disproportionate number of juveniles are convicted based on false confessions (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). The interrogation process is the same for both juvenile and adult offenders as they are questioned using the same manipulative and coercive method (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). However, it is important to understand that juvenile offender’s psychological maturity is significantly less when compared to adults (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). As a result, the argument was made that juvenile delinquents should be provided with “special protections during interrogation”; however, the courts ruled against this notion (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). Furthermore, investigators are aware of juvenile offender’s developmental vulnerability, but they fail to take that into account when using the Reid technique in interrogations (Kostelnik, & Reppucci, 2009). The Reid technique is tailored specifically to adult suspects, but it is used as a
The technique while effective against guilty suspects have a tendency to elicit false confessions from innocent suspects. The Reid technique is applied the same way for both adults and juvenile suspects. However, based on the low maturity level of juvenile offenders they are more likely to wrongfully implicate themselves in criminal activities that they did not have any part of. Confessions carries a lot of weight in a court proceeding, as suspects are often convicted without any physical or corroborating evidence. It was not until recent years that a prevalence of wrongful convictions through false confession was noticed. Wrongfully convicted people spend many years in prison before they were exonerated by DNA evidence. Furthermore, contrary to popular beliefs, numerous studies found that innocent suspects do provide investigators with false incriminating