Law360 Canada (May 15, 2026, 9:34 AM EDT) --

Timothy Moore

In R. v. Ordonio, 2025 ONCA 135, the Criminal Lawyers’ Association (CLA), as intervener, argued that Reid technique-induced statements from an accused person should be treated as presumptively inadmissible. The Court of Appeal thought otherwise, opining that the determination of whether (or not) the technique had been used would be a labour-intensive misuse of resources. The decision surveyed some of the criticisms of the practice from the criminology literature. It also considered how some Canadian courts have viewed the procedure. A more comprehensive and contemporary review might have given rise to a different result.

For example, the court, at para. 55, approvingly quotes the concurring reasons of Justice James Joseph Carthy in R. v. Barrett (1993), 64 O.A.C. 99:

This assumption — that the Reid technique reliably exploits behavioural cues to deception — goes to the core of the problem. There are not now, nor have there ever been, “symptoms” of deception that are adequately diagnostic of the “truth,” notwithstanding the Reid manual’s assertions to the contrary. Indicators of deceit purportedly include facial expressions, gaze aversion, posture, hand gestures and the like. As Vrij et al. (2010) noted, there is no evidence of indicators of deceit akin to Pinocchio’s growing nose.

The police are not the only professionals who would benefit greatly from the ability to distinguish the truth from lies. So too would judges, customs agents, insurance adjustors, loan officers, fraud investigators, etc. Hundreds of empirical studies conducted all over the world over the past three decades have repeatedly demonstrated that behavioural cues are not diagnostic of truth and deception.

The danger of a reliance on invalid indicia of deception is that the inference of “deceit” becomes a watershed moment that triggers a subsequent aggressive, accusatory, guilt-presumptive interrogation intended to secure not “the truth” but a confession. The OCA decision cited R. v. Oickle, [2000] 2 S.C.R. 3 22 times. As professor Don Stuart has observed in Charter Justice in Canadian Criminal Law (Thomson Reuters), Oickle is troubling because it implicitly sanctions “a wide range of excessively coercive interrogation techniques.” “Handling denials” and “overcoming objections” are two of the nine steps outlined in the Reid interrogation method for which there may have been little or no evidentiary basis for suspicion in the first place. Reassurances that the techniques described will not cause false confessions are woven throughout all editions of the manual.

There has been extensive scientific study of interrogation practices over the past couple of decades. There are alternative — and ultimately fairer and more reliable — evidence-based approaches to interviewing suspects. Instead of focusing exclusively on confessions, these methods highlight cooperation with the subject and the elicitation of information that can provide investigators with the opportunity to corroborate evidence already collected and to pursue other leads. The PEACE method is one such approach. It has become standard practice in the U.K., Norway, Australia and New Zealand.

A recent article by Radley Balko in The Intercept describes how Paul Heaton, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, tricked ChatGPT into confessing to something it could not possibly have done. Heaton used Reid tactics to procure the false confession. The distinguished criminologist Saul Kassin commented, “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?” Balko ended his piece with the observation that Reid is still the standard interrogation method in most U.S. police departments. “Canada and much of Europe,” he added, “have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method.”  “Much of Europe,” yes. Canada? Au contraire. If only…

Timothy Moore is professor emeritus, Department of Psychology, Glendon College, York University.

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