Keep Your Mouth Shut

Number one piece of advice if you’re ever questioned by the police about a crime: keep your mouth shut until your lawyer gets there.

Interrogation techniques are so psychologically effective, people confess all the time. Even when they didn’t do it.

Case in point: after 12 hours of interrogation, Frank Sterling confessed to a vicious murder he didn’t commit. Why? The answer used to be that police would literally beat confessions out of people. Once that “investigative practice” was outlawed, police sought non-violent ways to accomplish the same thing. John E. Reid developed a procedure in the early 1960’s that seemed to provide the solution. It turns out, the Reid technique is very, very effective:

The procedure basically involves three stages meant to break down a suspect’s defenses and rebuild him as a confessor.

First, the suspect is brought into custody and isolated from his familiar surroundings. This was the birth of the modern interrogation room.

Next the interrogator lets the suspect know he’s guilty—that he knows it, the cops know it, and the interrogator doesn’t want to hear any lies. The interrogator then floats a theory of the case, which the manual calls a “theme.” The theme can be supported by evidence or testimony the investigator doesn’t really have.

In the final stage, the interrogator cozies up to the subject and provides a way out. This is when the interrogator uses the technique known as “minimization”: telling the suspect he understands why he must have done it; that anyone else would understand, too; and that he will feel better if only he would confess.

The interrogator is instructed to cut off all denials and instead float a menu of themes that explain why the suspect committed the crime—one bad, and one not so bad, but both incriminating, as in “Did you mean to do it, or was it an accident?”

It’s shocking just how quickly a bit of isolation and a bit of stress can break a person down. Hundreds of “compliant confessions” have been overturned in the last 30 years based on physical evidence that proves the person that confessed didn’t actually commit the crime. The Reid technique is so devastatingly effective, the Supreme Court singled it out in its Miranda decision (requiring cops to explain to those they arrest that they have a right to remain silent).

If you’re ever picked up for anything, call a lawyer. Just having another person in the room prevents the Reid technique from working: without the isolation, the psychological games don’t work.

See NY Mag for a whole article about Frank Sterling.

Photo Credit: DieselDemon