If a Method Cannot Survive Daubert Scrutiny in the Courtroom,
It Does Not Belong in the Interview Room—or the Training Room
By Stan B. Walters, The Lie Guy®
Interview & Interrogation Expert
Interview failures rarely begin in the interview room. They begin in the training room, where decisions are made about which methods are treated as legitimate and which are not.
When interview techniques are taught without meeting scientific and legal standards, foundational errors follow practitioners into the interview room and into the courtroom.
The issue is not intent, effort, or experience — it is reliability. Methods that lack reliability contaminate interviews, distort assessment, and fail under scrutiny. The courtroom is where the failure is exposed, but the cause almost always originates upstream.
The Training Room: Where Interview Failures Begin
The most consequential interview decisions are made long before the first question is asked. In the training room, instructors and decision-makers determine which methods are endorsed, repeated, and ultimately relied upon in practice. When those choices are made without rigorous standards for discipline and reliability, error is built into the system from the start.
Training is where methods should be challenged, tested, and allowed to fail safely.
When unreliable techniques are normalized instead, they create false confidence and flawed diagnostic habits that carry forward into real interviews. Once those habits are formed, they are difficult to correct under operational pressure, and they set the conditions for downstream failure.
The Interview Room: How Unreliable Methods Create Harm
Once unreliable methods move from the training room into practice, the interview room becomes the point where those flaws begin to cause real harm. Techniques that lack discipline and reliability increase the risk of contamination, misdiagnosis, and distorted assessments of credibility. Instead of facilitating accurate, information-rich statements, the interview process is shaped by assumptions and cues that cannot be defended.
These failures are not always obvious in the moment. An interview may appear productive while quietly undermining its own reliability. Once contamination occurs, credibility cannot be restored — only argued about. What unfolds in the interview room sets the stage for what will later be examined under legal scrutiny.
The Courtroom: Where Unreliable Methods Fail Under Scrutiny
In the courtroom, unreliable interview methods do not fail quietly. They are exposed through cross-examination, expert challenge, and judicial review. Techniques that appeared effective in training or convincing in the interview room are evaluated against legal standards that demand reliability, transparency, and methodological soundness.
Daubert scrutiny does not assess confidence or good faith. It evaluates whether a method can be tested, explained, and defended. When interview practices lack that foundation, the consequences surface in testimony, evidentiary challenges, and case outcomes. The courtroom does not create these failures — it reveals them.
Training Decisions Demand Rigorous Discipline and Reliability
Training decisions carry downstream consequences that cannot be undone once reliability is compromised. Experience does not replace foresight in training decisions; it amplifies the consequences of unreliable methods. Discipline and reliability must be applied before a method is taught, not after it fails under scrutiny. That requires clear standards, applied consistently, to determine which techniques qualify as legitimate training and which do not. When those standards are absent or unevenly enforced, failure is not a possibility — it is a matter of time.
Failures tolerated in the training room do not remain there. They surface in the interview room through contamination and misdiagnosis, and they are ultimately exposed in the courtroom under cross-examination and judicial review. No matter where the failure is first observed — in the courtroom, the interview room, or the classroom — the conclusion is the same. If a method cannot survive Daubert scrutiny in the courtroom, it does not belong in the interview room — nor in the training room where it is first introduced.