Making a Murderer: the Reid Technique and Juvenile Interrogations
In the Netflix program, Making a Murderer, which examines the conviction of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey for the sexual assault and murder of Teresa Halbach, there is a reference made by Brendan Dassey's defense attorney, Mark Fremgen, that "the police are taught a technique by Reid in Chicago to elicit confessions, not get to the truth." Clearly Mr. Fremgen is misinformed or is intentionally misstating the facts.We state the following in our book, Criminal Interrogation and Confessions :
The purpose of an interrogation is to learn the truth.There are a number of possible outcomes of a successful interrogation other than obtaining a confession from the guilty party. Some of these are: (1) The subject is identified as innocent; (2) The subject did not commit the offense under investigation but lied about some aspect of the investigation (motive, alibi, access, etc.); or (3) The subject did not commit the offense under investigation but knows who did.
As to the suggestion that the investigator is not interested in learning the truth, in our interrogation training materials and books we spend a considerable amount of time describing what to look for as a possible indication of innocence during the interrogation process. For example, as early as the 3rd edition of Criminal Interrogation and Confessions published 30 years ago in 1986, we stated the following with respect to recognizing an innocent suspect's denials:
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