A few years ago, Captain Christian Cory (Wichita, Kansas, Police Department) had the following experience:
I was receiving my yearly evaluation from my commander in the homicide section. He asked me, “How many confessions did you get this year?” “Zero,” I replied. “Really? Zero?” This was not a question—it was an expression of surprise. But it didn’t matter how many confessions I didn’t get because I had a 100 percent clearance rate that year. Every single case I had been assigned was solved and charged.
A confession does not mean case clearance. My approach was not on confessions. I focused on gathering information, eliciting negative statements (false exculpatory statements), and creating the strongest case possible—without setting confession as the goal or, potentially worse, a necessity. Instead of pushing for an admission of guilt, I used information-gathering techniques to test a suspect’s account, uncover inconsistencies, and allow them to either tell the truth or provide statements that could later be disproven by evidence. This strategy didn’t just solve cases—it built stronger, more reliable ones.
Today, confession evidence is typically considered the gold standard of a successful investigation. Indeed, a review of research and practice shows that the primary goal of interrogation in the United States is to elicit a confession.1 However, confession-driven interrogations using legacy methods are a limiting philosophy. Criminal cases are built on information, and confessions are only a part of that. After all, what is the plan if the suspect simply does not confess? Research shows, unsurprisingly, that a considerable portion of suspects maintain their innocence during interrogation.2
The field of interviewing and interrogation has undergone a rapid transformation that is still in progress. In the last decades, in part propelled by the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), which has been in existence for over 15 years and is currently administered by the FBI, there has been a substantial growth of scientific research on effective interviewing and interrogation. Researchers, mainly in the field of psychology, have conducted empirical work to answer fundamental questions like: What is the nature of the interrogation techniques commonly used by practitioners, and what are the effects of these techniques?
It is out of this branch of scientific study that it has become evident that confession-oriented, accusatory, “theme”-based tactics as those propagated through legacy interrogation methods corrupt the process of professional fact-finding and negatively impact the integrity of information in investigations, even for the most well-intentioned investigators.3 A considerable number of experimental and field studies indicate that legacy methods have a range of negative outcomes. These tactics have gained much empirical attention for their propensity to cause false confessions, a highly counterintuitive phenomenon that has been unequivocally linked to capital failures of the justice system, including numerous wrongful convictions.4 Short of false confessions, theme-based tactics and unvalidated lie detection techniques generate false information that may very well lead investigations astray, as well as being a general waste of resources and time.
Information-Gathering Approaches
Because of the many problems with theme-based, confession-seeking interrogation, researchers have proposed that investigators shift the goal from obtaining a confession to obtaining information with greater integrity and accuracy.5 Meta-analyses of the accumulated scientific literature show that information-gathering approaches indeed generate more information compared to confession-oriented ones. Importantly, and perhaps surprisingly, information-gathering tactics yield true confessions at an equal or higher rate compared to confession-oriented tactics.6 Information-gathering techniques also significantly reduce the risk of false confessions and the production of false case information.
Eliciting True and False Exculpatory Statements
In light of the research just reviewed, the authors strongly agree that information-gathering approaches are superior to confession-oriented ones. However, it is proposed that science-based interviews with suspects of crime could and should have more precise goals, in addition to generating as much information as possible. That is, while information is certainly the chief currency of investigations, during suspect interviews, a goal of the interview should be to elicit true exculpatory statements from innocent suspects, and false exculpatory statements from guilty persons. To be clear, false exculpatory statements are those where the suspect claims to be innocent, but they provide an account that can be proven false by evidence (whereas innocent suspects’ truthful accounts will be corroborated by the existing evidence).
Why are true and false exculpatory statements important, and why should investigators aim to elicit them? There are several reasons. First, there is now a considerable amount of literature on the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique, which aims precisely at eliciting these two different responses from guilty and innocent suspects.7 In the literature on SUE, false exculpatory statements are captured by the term statement-evidence inconsistency, again referring to elements of a statement that violate known facts. It is well established that the SUE technique elicits differences between truth tellers and liars in the form of statement-evidence (in)consistencies; of practical significance, these effects are known to be substantial.8 Second, questioning suspects in line with the SUE technique has two main outcomes: (1) for innocent suspects, it allows them to provide their account, uncontaminated by what the investigators know, which in turn can help clear them of suspicion; and (2) for guilty suspects, assuming the interviewer follows the protocol for the SUE technique, suspects’ false statements are likely to conflict with the evidence. In other words, the SUE technique is an instrument to elicit true and false exculpatory statements. Third, and very important, the statements given by guilty suspects can be used to build a case against them; moreover, these statements can be introduced in court to cast doubt on the person’s credibility. A very interesting set of studies in 2018 found that “proven lies”—another term for false exculpatory statements—are as powerful as confessions in the eyes of juries.9 That is, these studies revealed that jurors convicted not only when the defendant had confessed, but also, at a comparable rate, when the defendant had made statements that contradicted the evidence. The conclusion to be drawn is that when investigators use techniques like SUE, which elicit false exculpatory statements from guilty suspects (and true exculpatory statements from innocent people), there may be no need for a confession in order to secure a conviction.
Applying science to the interviewing process involves not only developing and testing new techniques; it also involves thinking critically and constructively about the criminal investigation process and the goal of interrogation more specifically. A case-construction view considers that “what works” in interviewing and interrogation is closely connected to what works to build a credible and sound criminal case.10 It is firmly established by scientific research that confession-oriented techniques are problematic and even counterproductive. A viable alternative for meticulous investigators, well worth considering, is to shift focus to techniques away from the inducement of confessions toward the deliberate pursuit of true and false exculpatory statements. d
Notes:
1Gavin E. Oxburgh et al., eds., Interviewing and Interrogation: A Review of Research and Practice since World War II (Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2023).
2Stephen Moston and Geoffrey M. Stephenson, “A Typology of Denial Strategies by Suspects in Criminal Investigations,” in Handbook of Psychology of Investigative Interviewing: Current Developments and Future Directions, eds. Ray Bull, Tim Valentine, and Tom Williamson (John Wiley & Sons, 2009): 17–34.
3Fred E. Inbau et al., Criminal Interrogation and Confessions, 5th ed. (Jones & Bartlett, 2013).
4Saul M. Kassin et al., “Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendations,” Law and Human Behavior 34, no. 1 (February 2010): 3–38.
5Oxburgh et al., Interviewing and Interrogation.
6Christian A. Meissner et al., “Accusatorial and Information-Gathering Interrogation Methods and Their Effects on True and False Confessions: A Meta-Analytic Review,” Journal of Experimental Criminology 10, no. 4 (2014): 459–486.
7Maria Hartwig et al., “Detecting Deception Via Strategic Disclosure of Evidence,” Law and Human Behavior 29, no. 4 (August 2010): 469–484; Maria Hartwig et al., “Strategic Use of Evidence During Police Interviews: When Training to Detect Deception Works,” Law and Human Behavior 30, no. 5 (October 2006): 603–619; Maria Hartwig and Pär Anders Granhag, “Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE): A Review of the Technique and Its Principles,” in Interviewing and Interrogation: A Review of Research and Practice Since World War II, eds. Gavin E. Oxburgh et al. (Torkel Opsahl Academic EPublisher, 2023), 299–318.
8Maria Hartwig, Pär Anders Granhag, and Timothy Luke, “Strategic Use of Evidence During Investigative Interviews: The State of the Science,” in Credibility Assessment, eds. David C. Raskin, Charles R. Honts, and John C. Kircher (Academic Press, 2014), 1–36.
9Laure Brimbal and Angela M. Jones, “Perceptions of Suspect Statements: A Comparison of Exposed Lies and Confessions,” Psychology, Crime & Law 24, no. 2 (2018): 156–176.
10 For elaboration, see Timothy J. Luke et al., “Building a Case: The Role of Empirically Based Interviewing Techniques in Case Construction,” in Finding the Truth in the Courtroom: Dealing with Deception, Lies, and Memories, eds. Henry Otgaar and Mark L. Howe (Oxford University Press, 2017), 187–208.
Please cite as
Maria Hartwig and Christian Cory, “A Paradigm Shift in Science-Based Interviewing: Interrogating to Elicit True and False Exculpatory Statements,” Police Chief Online, June 18, 2025.
