Interviewing to Gather, Not to Win

The structure is the PEACE Model: preparation and planning; engage and explain; take the account, clarify and challenge; close; and evaluate afterward. It replaced accusatory interrogation in British practice after coerced confessions produced a run of wrongful convictions, and the order matters.

The uninterrupted account comes before any questioning. Interruption destroys recall and, worse, imports your structure into their memory, after which you can no longer tell which parts were theirs.

Then use the recall aids of the Cognitive Interview, developed by Ronald Fisher and Edward Geiselman, rather than leading questions. Ask them to mentally reinstate the context, to report everything however trivial, to recount the events in reverse order, and to describe the scene from another person's vantage point.

Question wording changes answers and then changes memory. Loftus and Palmer's 1974 paper reports two experiments, not one. In the first, asking how fast cars were going when they smashed into each other produced an average of about 40.8 miles per hour, against about 34 for hit. In the second, a week later, 32 percent of the smashed group reported broken glass in the film, against 14 percent of the hit group. There was no broken glass.

Challenge from the record, as questions about documents, not as accusations. Accusatory pressure is a documented producer of false confessions, which is why a major industry trainer, Wicklander-Zulawski & Associates, stopped teaching the confrontational Reid method in 2017. Close by summarizing back for correction, then evaluate what the account did and did not establish.

A confession is not a finding. It is one item of evidence, and it is the item most likely to have been produced by the process that collected it.