Police Interrogations: Highly Coerced Police Confessions

Police interrogations have been relied upon by Canada’s legal system since the late 1800’s; however, the methods of interrogations have gone unquestioned until the past few decades. Prior to the 1930’s, the third degree was the consulted method to elicit confessions from suspects. In 1931 the harsh, coercive process prompted an investigation which led to the public reveal of the third degree’s tactics. The report was followed by a “landmark decision in 1936 by the united states supreme court to invalidate physically coerced police confessions”. This occurrence bred the necessity for a subsequent method that is the Reid method. The longstanding interrogation technique known as the Reid method invokes an aggressively persuasive approach. Originally

The method is referred to as the PEACE technique, it is an acronym for: Planning and Preparation, Engage and Explain, Account, Closure and Evaluation. It’s implementation in the UK was a result of criticism of the ethics of the Reid technique. Baldwin took it upon himself to analyze 4 police forces and 400 interrogation style interviews, from his analyses he deemed the Reid method to be haphazard and unsound ethically. From his findings he engineered the PEACE method that draws from the Reid technique in that its entirety could be compared to the first two phases of the Reid technique. The PEACE method is reliant upon hard evidence and an interview fore-mostly dominated by the suspect. Instead of a closed-minded interrogation whose goal is to obtain confessions, the PEACE method is crafted to gain truth through an open-minded, fact-finding

The nine segments of the interrogation process is extensive but will be briefly summarized below. The first stage includes confrontational statements indicating plausible guilt to convey to the suspect that his guilt is known to be true by the interrogator. The following stage develops through posing questions to unfold a theme as to how and why the crime transpired. It is here the interrogator makes note of whether the suspect is emotional or non-emotional and acts accordingly by tailoring an approach to the suspects personality using a moral approach, for example. The third step handles the denials by acutely dismissing them, as “suspects who deny their involvement in criminal activity are less likely to offer a confession later in the interrogation”. Fourthly, the interrogator aims to overcome the objections of the suspect by reinstating the theme and prompting a confession. The fifth stage refers to the retention of the suspect’s attention, this step is crucial as guilty suspects tend to withdraw psychologically at this point, therefore the interrogator must capture and retain their attention through visual aids or increasing proximity. Stage six pertains to appealing to the passive suspects who are now willing to listen and could be outwardly emotional, here is where interrogators empathetically urge the suspect to tell the truth.