The art of getting confessions

From the Ottawa Citizen Oct 23, 1952. A story out of the Korean conflict.



Absent the drugs and hynosis and add the denial of legal advice and you have the basic techniques used to get confessions by police and other law officials.

And even then, there are examples where drugs and hypnosis have been used - undeclared and unauthorised in the case of the former. 

The techniques outlined are from the Reid Technique (which contains official and unofficial methods) taught to all officials who conduct interrogations and interview witnesses in the US. These technique are largely banned in the rest of the world due to the high number of false confessions they result in. 

John Reid was a former Chicago cop who took up the challenge to come up with an effective alternative to physical torture as a means of getting a confession after that method was officially banned by the Supreme Court. He developed the techniques in conjunction with his work in developing the junk science known as polygraphs and augmented it with a lot of pop psychology.

Ruby is probably the clearest example and it did include drugs and hypnosis.

But to start at the start... one of the methods in drawing out a confession is to offer the suspect an excuse for the crime as in "We know you robbed that bank because your little baby needs an operation. We understand. The courts will go easy on you because of that if you confess now and save us time and money." All a lie of course because cops can lie about anything to suspects, witnesses and the media with complete impunity in the interests of building a case. 

In Ruby's case, he was given the excuse of claiming he did it on the spur of the moment to save Jacqui from having to appear as a witness in a trial.  That excuse was supplied by his first lawyer who happened to be with the police all morning before talking to Ruby and offering that excuse. 

It is an absolute classic example of a lie used to help ease someone into confessing. In this case, it not only makes Ruby look almost heroic, it also takes away any consideration of planning needed to obtain the death penalty. There was no mandetory mminimum for murder in Texas. In theory, Ruby could have got a very minimal sentence and I believe that is what was promised him. 

Prior to the assassination, he was given right-wing propaganda to read on becoming a hero and was making plans on finding a more expensive apartment and another nightclub to operate. The spiel fed him would be along the lines of "you'll do a couple of easy years. you'll be a big shot in there and when you get, you can get a book deal, or maybe even a deal to make a movie about your life. You'll be fanous and rich.  All lies. The defense went for a completely useless attempt to paint him as having a rare type of epilepsy and which caused him to do it and therefore he was not guilty by reasons of insanity. 

This defense had been attempted only once prior and that was in England. It failed. 

After Ruby won his appeal and stay of execution, they began adninistering drugs claiming they were vitamins for his flu. Unless he was having a severe advese reaction to vitamins, they were no such thing. He started getting extremely paranoid, ranting constantly about Nazis and about the saftey of his family and seeing everything literally going up in flames. They also used hypnsosis during psych examinations. 

The so-called flu ended up being terminal cancer. He never made it to that second trial. Nor was he ever going to, cancer or no cancer, any more than Oswald was ever going to have his day in court.

Very well explained, Greg. Thanks.