![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It turns out that, as well as the well known stories of the writing on the wall, the lion's den, and the apocalyptic visions, there's a thirteenth chapter of the book of Daniel covering the story of Susanna and the Elders which is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but didn't make it into the protestant version. It's a shame because I found Daniel 13 quite interesting, not least because it might just be the oldest detective story I've come across. You can find the full text of Daniel 13 below but to briefly summarise it involves two elders attempting to blackmail Susanna into having sex with them by threatening to tell people she was commiting adultery with a young man. Susanna refuses them and they carry out their threat. The people are getting ready to stone her when Daniel, moved by the spirit of God, decides to intervene. He proves that the elders were lying by separating them and conducting two interviews in which he asks each in turn to tell him what kind of tree Susanna was beneath when they allegedly saw her commiting adultery. The two accounts differ on the species of tree and this is enough to convince the people that they're malefactors and so they stone them instead of Susanna.
What strikes me on reading this is firstly how well the story parallels an episode of Columbo, the detective show which always showed you the villain at the start so you could enjoy the process of Columbo catching them with his disarming yet meticulous approach to crime. Truly there is nothing new under the sun. Secondly, and more interestingly, Daniel is employing a version of the cognitive interview technique which is the current gold standard for forensic interviewing. It essentially works on the principle that lies require more cognitive effort to maintain than truth because there is no true and hence rich memory to rely on. The cognitive interview is designed to bring to light the contradictions in false testimony without psychologically contaminating true memories or illiciting false confessions.
This might sound obvious but for many years the gold standard for interrogation technique was the Reid technique which starts from the premise that the goal of an interrogation is to induce the suspect to confess. Unsurprisingly it is a technique with limited empirical evidence to support it and has been accused of manufacturing many false confessions, particularly as there are no modifications when interviewing young or cognitively impaired suspects.
What Daniel does is ask an open question which a genuine witness should be able to answer with ease. While he starts from a presumption of guilt, and openly accuses the elders of concocting the whole story, his interview technique allows for the possibility that he is mistaken. If the two men answer the same then his plan has failed. He could have reduced the likelihood of this happening. He could have introduced the species of tree himself in his question or merely presented the suspects with a statement about the tree and invited them to agree or disagree with it. By asking an open question he reduces the likelihood of his own involvement creating a false yet incriminating memory, something that a careless interviewer can easily do.
It's a fascinating little story and one I really wish I'd been aware of when I was writing essays about interrogation technique. I've occasionally dabbled with the idea of writing some historical crime stories set in the distant past. It's encouraging to think that I could write an ancient character with an instinctive grasp of good interview technique and point to a Biblical source as evidence that such a thing might be plausible.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+13&version=NRSVCE
What strikes me on reading this is firstly how well the story parallels an episode of Columbo, the detective show which always showed you the villain at the start so you could enjoy the process of Columbo catching them with his disarming yet meticulous approach to crime. Truly there is nothing new under the sun. Secondly, and more interestingly, Daniel is employing a version of the cognitive interview technique which is the current gold standard for forensic interviewing. It essentially works on the principle that lies require more cognitive effort to maintain than truth because there is no true and hence rich memory to rely on. The cognitive interview is designed to bring to light the contradictions in false testimony without psychologically contaminating true memories or illiciting false confessions.
This might sound obvious but for many years the gold standard for interrogation technique was the Reid technique which starts from the premise that the goal of an interrogation is to induce the suspect to confess. Unsurprisingly it is a technique with limited empirical evidence to support it and has been accused of manufacturing many false confessions, particularly as there are no modifications when interviewing young or cognitively impaired suspects.
What Daniel does is ask an open question which a genuine witness should be able to answer with ease. While he starts from a presumption of guilt, and openly accuses the elders of concocting the whole story, his interview technique allows for the possibility that he is mistaken. If the two men answer the same then his plan has failed. He could have reduced the likelihood of this happening. He could have introduced the species of tree himself in his question or merely presented the suspects with a statement about the tree and invited them to agree or disagree with it. By asking an open question he reduces the likelihood of his own involvement creating a false yet incriminating memory, something that a careless interviewer can easily do.
It's a fascinating little story and one I really wish I'd been aware of when I was writing essays about interrogation technique. I've occasionally dabbled with the idea of writing some historical crime stories set in the distant past. It's encouraging to think that I could write an ancient character with an instinctive grasp of good interview technique and point to a Biblical source as evidence that such a thing might be plausible.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+13&version=NRSVCE
