these is known as the Reid Technique after the officer who developed it, John Reid. Introduced in the 1940s and 50s, the strategy relies on deception, coercion and aggressive confrontation to secure confessions. It became the leading interrogation method used by law enforcement throughout the United States and has led to many confessions by innocent people. As of 2014, this technique was still popular with police interrogators even though the strategy produces less information from suspects, provides fewer true confessions and more false confessions than less confrontational interviewing techniques. Perjury and false accusations Witnesses in police investigations may lie for a variety of reasons including: personal ill-will towards the defendant, the desire to be paid, the desire to get a deal from prosecutors or police, or an effort to deflect attention from a person’s own involvement in a crime. An innocent person is more likely to be convicted when one or more witnesses have an incentive to testify, and those incentives are not disclosed to the jury. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 57% of cases where the convicted person was eventually exonerated involves perjury or false accusations. Prosecutorial misconduct This occurs in numerous ways including the concealment or destruction of exculpatory evidence; the failure to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defence; the failure to reveal that certain witnesses have been paid to testify; and the planting of incriminating evidence. An Innocence Project study found that 25% of DNA exonerations involved testimony that was known to be false by the police and another 11% involved the undisclosed use of coerced witness testimony. In other words, over one third of these wrongful convictions involved prosecutorial misconduct. Role of bias and cognitive distortions Confirmation bias is a psychological phenomenon whereby people tend to seek and interpret information in ways that support existing beliefs. Two inter-related mechanisms tend to operate: it begins with a biased interpretation of whatever information is available, followed by selectively searching for information which supports this interpretation. In police investigations, this comes into play when detectives identify a suspect early in an investigation, come to believe he or she is guilty, and then ignore or downplay other evidence that points to someone else or doesn't fit their hypothesis about what occurred. A number of factors contribute to this process. First, police officers often have heavy workloads and, in high-profile cases, often come under considerable pressure to catch the