Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

112 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
Officer ‘You don’t know?’
Miller ‘Right.’
Officer ‘You don’t know?’
Miller ‘I don’t know.’
Officer ‘So there’s a possibility you could have been there?’
Miller ‘Yeah, but I wasn’t.’
Officer ‘There’s a possibility?’
Miller ‘A possibility, right.’
Having accepted that there was a ‘possibility’ the officers stopped shouting at
Miller and in tape 8 they lowered the tempo and tone of their questioning.
Twenty minutes into tape 8 Miller provides a damning admission:
Miller ‘I don’t know, it...could do, it could have happened like that.’
The ‘force and menace’ of this style of questioning does not transfer onto the
printed page and it remains important to remember the context of this interview.
The defendant was not an intelligent individual, he had been detained
for five days and subjected to a constant stream of relentless questioning, conducted
by a number of officers who employed a variety of tactics. He did not
provide a confession until the 18th tape of interview. When placed in the context
of the entire case it is not surprising that their Lordships regarded this as an
example of ‘oppressive’ police interviewing tactics.
In some respects, given the key role played by the availability of an audiotape
record of this extensive interview session, we would have anticipated that much
greater use would have been made of this modern contemporaneous record. It
remains rather disappointing that so few tapes are reviewed in detail, by the
prosecution and defence, and even less are played to the courts.
COURT OUTCOME
One immediate feature of the details presented in the case summary (see
Table 4.1) is the large number of cases which were dismissed by the courts for
the use of oppressive or coercive interviewing tactics. If the nine cases where
a guilty plea was entered are removed, eight out of the remaining 11 cases
(73%) were dismissed because of irregularities concerning the conduct of police
interviewing tactics. This was so whether the interview took place on one day
and lasted 22 minutes, or was spread over a number of days. Furthermore, in
17 out of the 20 cases (85%) a confession was elicited by tactics that reached
at least the marked level. Allowing for the limitations of the small sample size,
these findings support the main hypothesis that people may well break down
in interview because of the application of police pressure and manipulation.
This finding is in stark contrast to our Royal Commission research (Pearse &
Gudjonsson, 1996a). Here the interviews were often short and conducted with
suspects who tended to confess early on in the interview or, if they denied the
allegation, were able to maintain their stance in the absence of any sustained
pressure (see also Baldwin, 1993).