There's a notorious Regina, Saskatchewan, case where some teenagers caved in to the cops, confessing to a rape they did not do. It was the Reid Technique.
Later when asked why someone would confess to a rape he'd not done and was nowhere near, the kid said, "it's like they break your will or something. Next thing I knew I was thinking, why not..... and I heard myself confessing."
The fortunate part was the kids were eventually let go.
Yes. The key psychological elements underpinning the Reid Technique (and other similar interrogation techniques) are specifically designed to elicit these sorts of responses and behaviours. That's precisely why they are grotequely improper and misleading so regularly.
In these sorts of techniques, the suspect is basically told that it's a given fact that they committed the crime (usually accompanied by a (often false) claim that the police have all the evidence they need to prove this). The basis of the interrogation then becomes not
if the suspect committed the crime, but
why. Once the suspect fails to realise the inherent assumption behind the "why" line of questioning (the assumption being that the suspect did in fact commit the crime), then it becomes progressively easier for the interrogator to subconsciously convince the suspect that yes, (s)he really did commit the crime, and the only question remaining is why.
Indeed, police using these sorts of techniques often (and erroneously) reason that if they ask a question like "What was going through your mind when you stabbed Mr X?" and the suspect
doesn't vehemently reply with something like "But I didn't stab Mr X", this in itself is a pointer to guilt. In other words, if the response to that question is something like "I don't know, I don't remember any of this", many interrogators see this as some sort of positive indicator of guilt.
These techniques then go on to use a battery of psychological tricks and bluffs to bamboozle, confuse and lead a suspect. For example, once suspects are sufficiently disoriented, they are often given "lesser of two evils" choices (e.g. "Do you regret stabbing Mr X, or are you still really glad you did it?"). In addition, these techniques are pretty much always framed with elements of catharsis ("You'll feel so much better when you get all this off your chest") and ways to present the crime to the suspect in a manner that appears to excuse or minimise the suspect's psychological guilt (e.g. Mr X goaded you until you just snapped, didn't he? I bet most people in your shoes would have reacted as you did by stabbing him"). And any deviation from the required path towards confession is carefully closed off, with the suspect quickly steered back onto the "correct" path.
Of course, as proper psychiatrists and psychologists know all too well, the potent combination of fear, intimidation, deference to authority figures, placement in unusual surroundings, and the sheer gravity of the situation, all add up to the very real prospect of suspects under interrogation - particularly those who have had no prior dealings with law enforcement investigations - becoming malleable and ultimately horrifically coerced. Most people who have produced false confessions as a result of these interrogation techniques say much the same thing in retrospect:
a) they felt they had no choice
but to say they did it;
b) they became convinced that things would actually be better for them if they did say they did it;
c) they became convinced that they must have done it (usually because of deference to the authority of the interrogators who claim proof of their guilt), and therefore became convinced that their mind was playing tricks on them (i.e. that they actually had "false memories" of
not having committed the crime!);
d) they felt that at least one of the interrogators was on their side, and that they (they interrogators) were actually helping them (the suspect) to get the best possible outcome for them (the suspect);
e) they felt a palpable sense of relief when they confessed;
f)
they felt that they had acted entirely of their own free will.
And all of the above is, in a nutshell, why the Reid Technique, and all similar interrogation techniques, are an appallingly unreliable and improper way to interrogate suspects. Its defenders say that such techniques are extremely effective at getting genuinely guilty people to confess -
and this is absolutely true. But they are also very clearly effective in getting a significant proportion of wholly-innocent people to make false confessions. Therefore, it's more-or-less irrelevant how good these techniques are at getting guilty people to make true confessions. The fact that they also regularly get innocent people to make false confessions means that they are categorically unfit for purpose, and must not be used under any circumstances.
