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The Reid technique

The material on this page is based in part on the Disclosure program Inside the Interrogation Room and partly on injusticebusters' personal experience and first person accounts from others who have been subjected to undue pressure by the police. Watch the video on CBC site (Realplayer, 16 minutes) At the bottom of this page, we have taken excerpts from the Supreme Court Decision R. v.Oickle Unfortunately this video is no longer available on the CBC site.The program Disclosure was cancelled after only 3 years -- hardly long enough for such an ambitious and necessary show to find its footing. We encourage people to write to the CBC protesting the cancellation of this excellent show which served the community by bringing important injustice stories to public attention. Whole case

See Jean Paul Aubee | Kyle Unger | Farand Bear | RCMP may look at techniques | Brenda Campbell | Monigue Turenne: When the Reid technique didn't work, Winnipeg cop Loren Schinkel forged a "confession" and provided it to Floida authorities Blog this

Q: Why would anyone confess to a crime they didn't commit?

A: Could be they were submitted to an interrogation which violates their charter rights

January 28, 2003: Gillian Findlay hosted a segment of CBC's Disclosure about the Reid technique for extracting confessions which is taught at the Canadian Police Academy and widely practiced by police officers all over Canada and the United States. If the confession is false, well, that's "just the price of doing business." The Reid method has been banned in the United Kingdom. The Disclosure show points out that the Canadian Supreme Court has approved the Reid technique, noting that in some cases it is difficult to "get confessions."

We wonder just how many people in jail on drug convictions are there because of this method, or, because the method was used on a friend or associate to get his or her name. While the Disclosure program concentrates on false confessions of murder and sex crimes, drug charges provided the police with the public sympathy they needed for the high courts to approve these methods. Many of our charter rights have been compromised during the "war on drugs." Trust between police and the community was eroded, perhaps irrevocably as police realized they could extend the technique to other crimes the public found abhorrent.

Maybe you thought those interrogation scenes from the movies were the fanciful work of a screenwriter, based partly on fact, but mostly on the imagination of the writer, or the imagination the writer has bestowed upon the interrogating cop. When we hear of sleep deprivation, continual questioning interrupted with periods of leaving the subject alone in a brightly lit room to be observed through a one-way mirror, we don't necessarily think the police in question are following instructions from a course at police academy. They are. The Reid method gets results. Sometimes the results are right. Often, they are wrong. Nonetheless, the Reid manual is considered "the Bible of interrogations" with "the nine commandments for making people talk."

Allowing the police to use lies and ruses serves to isolate a person on the way to criminalization. Family and friends often distance themselves from the person accused of a horrible crime. Of course that phone call everyone believes we are entitled to once we are in custody? It often is allowed too late to be helpful. And the right to see a lawyer? If you do not have a lawyer on retainer (and how many of us do?) you will wait hours, days and week-ends or else see an overworked legal aid lawyer who already thinks you are probably guilty because so many clients are. Very often defence lawyers, including legal aid and private criminal lawyers accept the Crown's version because they regularly lunch with these fellows and ladies. Have I been watching too many episodes of Law and Order? No. On that show the District Attorneys are usually scrupulous in avoiding getting too chummy with defence lawyers. In Saskatoon, the place that I know best, such socializing is common place.

Three Regina men spent two and a half months in jail and would probably have been convicted had not the real murderer, with a DNA match to the crime scene, been apprehended. Once the DNA match to Kenneth Patten was made, police had no choice but to let their other susupects go.

One of the falsely accused men, Joel Lavity, had come forward to the police to let them know he had seen the victim a few hours before her death. After being subjected to the Reid method, he "confessed" to being at the scene of the crime. Finally exonerated, he has become agorophobic, fearful to go outside, certain that many people believe he is a sex murderer. "It is like they steal your spirit, or something." As the Disclosure show points out, "For someone who has confessed, there can never be innocence."

The Regina men who were charged with first degree murder were so intimidated and brainwashed that one of them, Douglas Firemoon, even assisted with a "re-enactment" of the crime. He got all the salient details wrong. He claimed his friend used a knife when in fact the victim was strangled. He has been told that Joel confessed. Joel has been told that he might have blacked out and has been tricked into agreeing he could have committed the vicious crime while in a comotose state.

Nonetheless Joel Lavity, Doug Firemoon and a young offender would have gone to trial for first degree murder based on this "evidence" had not the real murdere been apprehended.

An Edmonton man, Mike St. John falsely confessed to aggravated assault on his infant son after hours of denying he had anything to do with the so-called crime. He says he does not know how the confession happened.

Part of the Reid technique instructs that a suspect must not be allowed to say he didn't do it. "The more often he says he didn't do it, the harder it will be to get a confession out of him."

In all the police interrogations shown on Disclosure, we see the accused denying involvement and being interrupted by the interrogator. The next step is to suggest an alternative scenario and get the suspect to agree to its reasonableness. A person is then implicated without realizing it has happened.

This is what happened to Dwight Grant, a Manitoba math teacher who falsely "confessed" to molesting a student. In fact he confessed to nothing. He was surprised and humiliated to find his name and the charge published in the newspaper the next day. Needless to say, his life can never be the same.

Victims of the Reid technique are very much like victims of sexual assault. They are ashamed, both for the public humiliation associated with the crime they are charged with and for having been tricked and coerced into saying things they did not want to say. The Manitoba judge in the Grant case said he had been subjected to a brainwashing exercise.

Tim Brown, lawyer for one of the Regina men points out that anyone could have seen that his client was fragile and not a good candidate for this method. A teacher of the method from the police academy acknowledges that while they teach the method, no part of the course teaches who would or would not be appropriate candidates.

The method is used by the Winnipeg Police. Monique Turenne was subjected to it for several hours and she refused to confess. Nonethtless, the police produced a statement which was "signed" by her. The only problem with this "confession" is that the signture was forged and that the entire nine page statement was created by Officer Loren Schinkel (who is also head of the police union).

Chief Ewatsky had stood by his cop. The manufactured confession is being used in extradition proceedings to have Turenne taken to Florida where she has been accused, by a man who probably committed the murder, of having been his accomplice and the mastermind. The Winnipeg and Florida police have conspired with mischievous relatives to tie up the estate of Monique Turenne's deceased husband so that she and her two children have had to live in poverty for the last seven years. They also have a "signed" statement from her ex-husband which he claimed he did not make.

A variation of the Reid method was used by Sup't Brian Dueck when he was a corporal to get statements from three FAS children alleging adults had sexually assaulted them. These videotaped statements, as well as videotaped interrogations of the suspects, formed the basis of the high-profile "Scandal of the Century" and the smearing of inocent people resulted in the $10M lawsuit which is scheduled for pre-trial in May. His interrogation of Anita Klassen follows Reid from step one to step nine.

Indexed as: R. v. Oickle

Her Majesty The Queen, appellant; v. Richard Floyd Oickle, respondent, and The Attorney General for Ontario and the Criminal Lawyers' Association (Ontario), interveners. [2000]

2 S.C.R. 3 [2000] S.C.J. No. 38 2000 SCC 38 File No.: 26535. Supreme Court of Canada 1999: November 2 / 2000: September 29.

Present: L'Heureux-Dubé, McLachlin, Iacobucci, Major, Bastarache, Binnie and Arbour JJ. ON APPEAL FROM THE COURT OF APPEAL FOR NOVA SCOTIA

• . . .The confessions rule focuses not just on reliability but also on voluntariness broadly defined.
• The common law confessions rule can offer protections beyond those guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
• While it may be appropriate in certain cases to interpret one in light of the other, it would be a mistake to assume one subsumes the other entirely. In defining the confessions rule it is important to keep in mind its twin goals of protecting the rights of the accused without unduly limiting society's need to investigate and solve crimes.
• The application of the confessions rule is of necessity contextual. Hard and fast rules simply cannot account for the variety of circumstances that vitiate the voluntariness of a confession.
• When reviewing a confession, a trial judge should therefore consider all the relevant factors. The judge should strive to understand the circumstances surrounding the confession and ask if it gives rise to a reasonable doubt as to the confession's voluntariness, taking into account all the aspects of the rule.
• The relevant factors include threats or promises, oppression, the operating mind requirement and police trickery.
• While obviously imminent threats of torture will render a confession inadmissible, most cases will not be so clear. The use of veiled threats, for instance, requires close examination.
• The police may often offer some kind of inducement to the suspect to obtain a confession. This becomes improper only when the inducements, whether standing alone or in combination with other factors, are strong enough to raise a reasonable doubt about the voluntariness of the confession.
• An important consideration in all cases is to look for a quid pro quo offer by interrogators, regardless of whether it comes in the form of a threat or a promise.
• Oppressive conditions and circumstances clearly also have the potential to produce an involuntary confession. In assessing oppression, courts should consider whether a suspect was deprived of food, clothing, water, sleep, or medical attention; was denied access to counsel; was confronted with fabricated evidence; or was questioned aggressively for a prolonged period of time.
• The operating mind doctrine only requires that the accused knows what he is saying and that it may be used to his detriment.
• Like oppression, the operating mind doctrine should not be understood as a discrete inquiry completely divorced from the rest of the confessions rule.
• The operating mind doctrine is just one application of the general rule that involuntary confessions are inadmissible.
• Lastly, the police use of trickery to obtain a confession must also be considered in determining whether a confession is voluntary or not.
• This doctrine is a distinct inquiry. While it is still related to voluntariness, its more specific objective is maintaining the integrity of the criminal justice system.
• There may be situations in which police trickery, though neither violating the right to silence nor undermining voluntariness per se, is so appalling as to shock the community.
• In such cases, the confessions should be excluded.
  In sum, because of the criminal justice system's overriding concern not to convict the innocent, a confession will not be admissible if it is made under circumstances that raise a reasonable doubt as to voluntariness. Voluntariness is the touchstone of the confessions rule and a useful term to describe the various rationales underlying the rule.
• If the police interrogators subject the suspect to utterly intolerable conditions, or if they offer inducements strong enough to produce an unreliable confession, the trial judge should exclude it.
• Between these two extremes, oppressive conditions and inducements can operate together to exclude confessions.
• If the trial judge properly considers all the relevant circumstances, then a finding regarding voluntariness is essentially a factual one, and should only be overturned for some palpable and overriding error which affected the trial judge's assessment of the facts.

Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ'd.
William Blake, The Proverbs of Hell

Truth suppress'd, whether by courts or crooks, will find an avenue to be told. Sheila Steele, injusticebusters.com

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Publisher Sheila Steele

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injusticebusters court advice :

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Why you should dump your preliminary hearing (written July 1998 and still valid)

 

Sermonette: Sucked in, Diegested and spit out by Saskatoon police (You will find links to many more sermonettes in the sidebar on this page

 

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Inquiry into the malicious prosecution of David Milgaard untanling 36 years of Saskatchewan police and Crown misconduct: : Opening day | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |

 

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See John Chalmers case

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Hatchen and Munson: These two drove Darrell Night to the edge of Saskatoon on a freezing January night in 2000. They were found guilty of unlawful confinement, did some time and are acknowledged by the Saskatoon Police Service for each having served for 17 years. The Police Association stood by them and paid for their defence until they were convicted. Only then were they fired.

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An incredible, long series on abusive cops in the Seattle Post-Intelligence

 

Canadians who have been wrongfully convicted because of improper investigations combined with zealous Crowns

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NEW: Kirstin Lobato

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Birmingham The Central Park Jogger case | Last year's disclosure broadcast material of police Big Man technique after publication bans were lifted by Supreme Court. Nov. 20, 2001: CBC Disclosure piece featuring George Mentuk and Olivia Edgars tapes (14 minutes)

Foster Parent case | Martensville | Leon Walchuk (manufactured evidence, destruction of evidence and incomplete disclosure leads to a murder conviction) | Don Smith obscenity conviction in Fort Frances, Ontario | Supreme Court overrules bans on publication of more police coercive techniques: Disclosure stories | Witness tampering in the Foster Parent case | William Upshaw | West Memphis Three | Kirsten Lobato