This program provides criminal defense lawyers with a comprehensive, research-based understanding of modern police interrogation practices and why they so often produce unreliable—and sometimes false—confessions. It traces the development of psychological interrogation in the United States, with a detailed focus on the Reid Method and its core assumptions: that investigators can accurately detect guilt, overcome denials, and elicit truthful confessions without coercion. By breaking down the accusatory, confession-driven techniques actually taught to law enforcement—such as isolation, false evidence ploys, minimization, and implied promises—the program exposes how interrogation is designed to persuade rather than discover truth.

Criminal defense lawyers who watch this program will gain a clear framework for understanding how false and coerced confessions occur. Drawing on decades of social science research, laboratory studies, DNA exonerations, and real-world case data, the program explains the three primary errors that lead to unreliable confessions: misclassification, coercion, and contamination. It identifies situational risk factors like lengthy interrogations and psychological pressure, as well as individual vulnerabilities such as youth, mental illness, cognitive impairment, and suggestibility. These concepts give defense attorneys the language and science needed to explain to courts and juries why a confession can sound convincing—and still be false.

The program also delivers concrete litigation strategies for challenging confession evidence before trial and at trial. Lawyers will learn how to assess whether a confession is suppressible, how to cross-examine interrogators effectively, and how to frame arguments around coercion, contamination, and unreliability. It addresses discovery issues, the importance of recording, and the strategic use of expert witnesses, including psychologists and other specialists. By showing how to answer the two central questions in any false confession case—why the client confessed and how we know it was false—this program equips criminal defense attorneys with powerful tools to suppress confessions, educate fact-finders, and win cases that might otherwise seem unwinnable.