Strategic disclosure of evidence: Perspectives from psychology and law.

Abstract

The police frequently present their evidence to suspects in investigative interviews. Accordingly, psychologists have developed strategic ways in which the police may present evidence to catch suspects lying or to elicit more information from suspects. While research in psychology continues to illustrate the effectiveness of strategic evidence disclosure tactics in lie detection, lawyers and legal research challenge these very tactics as undermining fair trial defense rights. Legal research is alive to the problems associated with strategically disclosing evidence to a suspect, such as preventing lawyers from advising the suspect effectively, increasing custodial pressure for the suspect, and worsening working relations between lawyers and police. This paper brings together the opposing research and arguments from the two disciplines of psychology and law, and suggests a new way forward for future research and policy on how the police should disclose evidence.

When the Evidence Is Incorrect: an Exploration of What Happens When Interviewers Unwittingly Present Inaccurate Information in Interviews with Suspects

“…Two decades of research have built a firm foundation for the notion that strategically disclosing evidence to suspects fosters the gathering of reliable and often incriminating information in an ethical and effective way Hartwig and Granhag 2015;Hartwig et al 2016;Oleszkiewicz and Watson 2020;Sandham et al 2020), and helps to obtain comprehensive accounts (Bull and Soukara 2010;Soukara 2005;Walsh and Bull 2012). Criminal investigators in a growing number of countries have been trained in several models of strategic interviewing (van Beek and Hoekendijk 2016;Clemens et al 2019;King (2002) in Sukumar et al 2016;Luke et al 2016;Nilsson, personal communication, 2019, November, 27;Rachlew, personal communication, 2020, March, 3;Snook et al 2020b). However, as stated in our introduction, the strategic interviewing research thus far has implicitly assumed that the evidence/information that is to be disclosed to the suspect is all correct information.…”

Rapport building in suspect interviewing: A comparison of relationship- and procedure-based approaches in a laboratory setting.

“…We speculate that the procedure-based approach might have led our participants to think that the interviewer has secured some evidence against them, therefore the interviewer needed only to follow procedure rather than trying to persuade the participant to confess through establishing a personal bond. This possibility is intriguing given the recent focus on exploring ethical ways to manipulate real offender's perception of evidence without influencing innocent suspects (i.e., the strategic use of evidence in Sukumar et al, 2016). Although we did not include innocent participants in the analysis, there is no reason to assume procedure-based techniques would change the innocents' perception of evidence.…”

“…Information-gathering approaches appear to fulfil this purpose yet more research is needed to support their use in practice (Swanner et al, 2016). For example, researchers are still trying to identify how to strategically use evidence to challenge suspects in a noncoercive manner, uncover more powerful deception cues, as well as facilitate admissions of crime (Sukumar, Wade, & Hodgson, 2016).…”

A Theory of Ethics to Guide Researchers’ Formulation of Psychological Investigative Interviewing Methods

“…To my knowledge, a compendium of generally applicable ethics principles does not exist when it comes to psychological interviewing methods. The current state of the literature is not exactly a shortcoming but an inevitable result of moral and legal entanglements commonly associated with investigative interviewing (see, e.g., Sukumar et al, 2016).…”