[FREE] What the Strategic Use of Evidence Technique Really Is

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What the Strategic Use of Evidence Technique Really Is

You’ve probably seen the Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) technique described as “late disclosure”: hold back your evidence, then reveal it. This is wrong. That might be one piece of it, and it’s the piece that gets repeated most, including in some interview and interrogation trainings. But it isn’t the whole technique, and reducing SUE to disclosure leaves out two components that matter just as much: planning and questioning.

SUE is built around what you already know. Before the interview, you plan questioning objectives around your evidence, such as a person’s afternoon whereabouts. During the interview, you ask questions that let the person give their account in their own words, so you can elicit uncontaminated statements that can be corroborated or explore contradictions between what’s said and what the evidence shows. Disclosure is one tool. Depending on how the…