Over a period of numerous decades, the courts have examined the issue of false confessions in thousands of cases, as a result of which the following represent the primary causes of false confessions:

• Physical abuse of the subject

• Threats of physical harm

• Threats of inevitable consequences

• Promises of leniency

• Denial of rights

• Denial of physical needs

• Excessively long interrogations

• Disclosure of crime details

• Failure to properly take into account the subject’s mental limitations and/or psychological disabilities

• Failure to properly modify approaches with socially immature juveniles

• Failure to properly corroborate confession details

In many confession cases, when an investigator has attended a Reid training program—or even simply references the Reid Technique—the defense and their “expert witness” often attribute every action taken during an interrogation to the Reid Technique, even when those actions are fundamentally inconsistent with the Reid Technique Principles of Practice.

In some cases defense attorneys and their ‘confession experts’ have gone so far as to suggest that the Reid technique involves locking suspects in small rooms for hours, denying suspects access to attorneys and a phone call, confining suspects without arrest warrants or legal justification, physically abusing and choking suspects, promising to set suspects free if they confessed, promising that a suspect would be subject to lesser charges if they signed false confessions, drafting false confessions without input from the suspect and demanding they sign them…..labeling all of these actions as part of the “Reid” interrogation process.

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