Melissa Lucio case: what is the Reid technique, the controversial strategy with which the police obtain confessions

Melissa Lucio was sentenced to death after she ended up confessing after more than five hours of interrogation. Can an innocent person plead guilty? Yes. And the strategies that the police use in their interrogations have a lot to do with it.

Melissa Lucio is on death row. Ella’s conviction for the death of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah de ella was based on her confession. For more than five hours, the police asked him, between shouts and threats, how he hit her, in addition to showing him photos of the girl’s corpse and the bruises on her body. With that strategy, the agents managed to get the mother to say: “I guess I did it, I guess I did it.”

But before that admission, the Hispanic had said more than 100 times that she had not hurt her baby. The pressure she was subjected to by the interrogators, coupled with the shock and grief over the loss of her daughter, led her to make a statement that her current attorneys consider a false confession. Without further evidence or witnesses, with an autopsy performed under dubious circumstances, and without an analysis of the circumstances that led her to incriminate herself, Lucio was found guilty and her execution is scheduled for April 27.

Can an innocent person confess to a crime that he did not commit? Most of us would think that no one would admit to something she didn’t do. But the truth is that it happens, and a lot.

According to The Innocence Project, which works to free innocents and prevent wrongful convictions, of more than 360 exonerations achieved through the use of DNA recognition techniques, 29% included false confessions.

As John Oliver pointed out in a recent edition of his HBO show: “The notion of someone cracking under too much pressure and confessing to something they didn’t do shouldn’t be that hard to understand.”

Since the oldest justice systems, confession has been considered the most irrefutable proof of guilt. Therefore, to get it, you could resort to any kind of torment. And although, fortunately, the country’s police officers can no longer apply torture (unconstitutional since 1936), very effective interrogation techniques have been developed to obtain confessions: from the guilty but also from the innocent.

In the 1950s, John E. Reid, a psychologist and former Chicago police officer, developed a methodology that became the standard for police interrogations: it went down in history as the “Reid technique.” As controversial as it is, many agencies still use it.

What is the Reid technique?

John E. Reid & Associates offers training on a technique that they explain is made up of three elements: the analysis of the facts, the investigative interview and, “only when appropriate,” the nine steps of the Reid interrogation.

The analysis of the facts serves to determine who to interview: victim, witnesses and potential suspects.

The interview, neither accusatory nor confrontational, seeks to obtain information and determine the credibility of the subject with “behavior-provoking questions.” According to Reid’s developers, liars often respond very differently from those who tell the truth.

When the information from the interview and the subsequent investigation determine that someone is the probable perpetrator, then the interrogation and its nine steps come into play, they say that always with empathy, understanding, reason and logic to find the truth.

It begins with the “positive confrontation”, in which the suspect is told that there is evidence against him to observe his behavior. Then he goes on to “develop the argument” according to his initial response and psychological profile: it can be done by sympathizing with the subject by minimizing the seriousness of the facts or looking for contradictions and lies.

This will always be done by “cutting off all denial” (preventing him from insisting that he is not to blame); “Overcoming the objections”, making the interrogated notice that his defense arguments are not heard; and “holding his attention,” to make sure he’s not distracted, through eye contact or hypothetical questions. In addition, it is necessary to “manage the passive mood”, showing a compassionate interrogator and indicating that the essential thing is that he confess.

The seventh element consists of “presenting alternatives”, the slip or accident and a serious monstrosity; or the honor of confessing against the negative repercussions of appearing before the judge without doing so.

In the last phase, the subject must “tell the crime in detail” to be credible: the confession must be accompanied by details that are not public knowledge and that serve to corroborate the facts. Finally, the interrogator must “convert the oral confession into writing” in order to ratify the self-incriminating statement.

Why is the Reid technique so controversial?

Critics of the technique speak of how easily it can lead to false confessions. For example, if the agent exerts excessive coercion or psychological manipulation, or if he “contaminates” the interrogated person with facts that are not in the public domain but that make the subject, confused, incorporate them into his story and incriminate himself.

Gisli H. Gudjonsson, Emeritus Professor of Forensic Psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, reviewed the recordings and transcripts of the 5 hours and 22 minutes of interrogation — without pauses — by four detectives and a Texas Ranger. right after Mariah’s death.

Gudjonsson estimates that the officers used seven main techniques to “break Lucio’s resistance and persistent denial” and to get him to plead guilty to the beatings they said had caused the girl’s death.

And he specifically identifies a time when one of the cops ramps up the pressure considerably by targeting the alleged drug paraphernalia found in the apartment, “using manipulation techniques that include Reid maximization.”

Furthermore, on the confession, when Melissa says that she assumes that she did it, the specialist highlights the limited credibility that she has as evidence given that her “incriminating nature is inadvertent”.

David Thomson, a certified forensic interviewer, adds in the affidavit presented as expert evidence by Lucio’s lawyers in his request for leniency, that the history of abuse suffered by the woman throughout her life made her a very vulnerable person to an interrogation with techniques like the Reid.

Regarding Reid, Thompson points out that, especially in vulnerable subjects, the risk of obtaining false information increases due to its coercive nature.

And Professor Saul Kassin, from the City University of New York, who has studied and written about Lucio’s case, assured Univision Noticias that “elements of the Reid technique were used —and misused— in her interrogation “.

On the other hand, University of San Francisco professor Richard Leo has been highly critical of the belief that researchers can be trained to tell when someone is lying from their body language.

In fact, according to Leo, numerous studies show that people are pretty bad at making such judgments. For the professor, the signals that the police use to supposedly detect if someone is lying are no better than mere chance.

In the case of Melisa Lucio, the Texas ranger who participated in the interrogation said that the lack of eye contact and her posture, with her shoulders slumped, were signs of guilt. That as soon as she entered the interrogation room, the woman’s expressionless attitude (the day her 2-year-old daughter had died), made her think that she had done something wrong. She is now on death row.