Attack on Reid technique fails. Failed attempt to prove a false confession.

R. v. Pearce (2012) MBQB[1]

By Gino Arcaro M.Ed., B.Sc.



I. Introduction

Picture this: You're investigating a homicide. No suspects. It becomes a cold case. Six months later, a victim's friend contacts you and says he may have information relevant to the case. After interviewing him, you suspect he may be involved. He consents to a polygraph test and passes.
The suspect contacts you again. This time he confesses that he had an argument with the victim and hit the victim with a golf club. The fact that a golf club was the murder weapon was not disclosed to the public.
You charge the suspect with manslaughter. The confession is your entire case. What should you anticipate at the trial? A defence of false confession. That's what happened in this case.
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Why would an innocent person falsely confess to a crime? In 15 years of policing, of which six years were detective work, I interrogated hundreds of people. No one falsely confessed. I've testified at countless voir dires. The defence of false confession was never raised in any one of my cases. I have no direct experience with false confessions.

The Supreme Court of Canada, in R. v. Oickle, acknowledged that although false confessions are rare, the problem of false confession is real and can't be ignored. In Oickle, the SCC explained the taxonomy of false confessions, five leading causes of false confessions. One is not the product of interrogation. The other four are.

In a nutshell, a false confession is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when coercive interrogation meets an extremely vulnerable personality. A false confession is the confluence of extremes - extremely aggressive tactics and an extremely compliant personality. There's much more to the psychological study of false confessions but that summarizes the problem for the purpose of this article.

False confession is a defence. It's raised by the accused during a voir dire to determine the admissibility of a confession the Crown tries to introduce. This case is an excellent point-of-reference of how the defence works and doesn't work. The accused was charged with manslaughter. The only evidence implicating him was a confession that he made to police. During the original voir dire, the confession was admitted as being voluntary and Charter-violation free. The defence took the position that his confession to police was not true. The defence called two psychologists at his trial intending to provide expert opinion evidence regarding false confessions in general and that the confession in this case was false. The issue was whether the expert opinions of both witnesses were admissible. They weren't - neither witness passed the expert witness test. That started a chain of events beginning with the failed "test" making their expert opinion inadmissible and culminating with the failure of the defence of false confession.

The issue of false confession places two challenges on the police; (i) it takes full measures to prevent one, and (ii) Be prepared for the possibility of the defence of false confession being raised. The starting point is understanding the concept of a false confession. You can't prevent what you don't understand. Study Oickle in depth.