Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Miscarriages of Justice and False Confessions 169
Evans was of low intelligence (he was said to have an IQ of no more than
75) and had a reputation as a pathological liar. It is easy to see how the jury
believed Christie and not Evans.
Kennedy has made an interesting analysis of Evans’ confession, which focuses
on the circumstances in which they were obtained and on Evans’ vulnerabilities.
First, he points to the discrepancy between the police and Evans in the timing
of the two statements made. The Notting Hill police officers alleged that the
confession was voluntary and spontaneous and without any prompting or prior
questioning. Evans claimed that he was kept up and questioned for hours into
the night until he confessed. Second, some of the vocabulary and phraseology
seems to have been more consistent with that of police officers, rather than of
Evans who was uneducated and illiterate. Svartvik (1968) analysed some of
the linguistic features of Evans’ statements and concluded that the linguistic
discrepancies observed supported Kennedy’s standpoint.
According to Kennedy, Evans was under considerable stress when he confessed
to the police, much of which was self-induced. Following his wife’s death
he became increasingly upset and concerned about what had happened, which
resulted in his going to the police station in Wales. Once arrested he was kept
in custody (which largely consisted of solitary confinement) for over two days
before being handed over to the London police. He had not been informed about
what was happening, except that he knew that his wife’s body had not been
found in the drain as expected. This resulted in uncertainty and confusion.
Once he arrived at Notting Hill police station he was shown his wife’s and
daughter’s clothing, in addition to the ligature that was used to murder his
daughter. He began to feel very guilty about not having done more to prevent
their deaths, which Kennedy considers to have been an important contributory
factor to his confession. The realization that his daughter had also been
murdered must have been an enormous shock to him.
It is not clear from Kennedy’s detailed account of the case whether Evans
ever came to believe that he might have done the killings himself (i.e. a coerced–
internalized false confession). Kennedy argues that Evans went through a ‘period
of conversion’ (p. 140) and hints that he may temporarily have come to believe
in his confession. However, the evidence that Evans’ confession had become
internalized is extremely weak and speculative. Kennedy’s inferences about the
nature of Evans’ confession appear to have been heavily influenced by Sargant’s
(1957) book Battle for the Mind, which deals with interrogations among the
Chinese Communists discussed in Chapter 8. Kennedy appears to have been
unaware of the subtle distinction between the coerced and compliant type of
false confession. My view is that it is more likely that Evans’ confession was of
the coerced–compliant type, but nobody will ever know as no detailed statement
was ever taken from Evans about his beliefs at the time of the interrogation.
Irving and McKenzie (1989) have made an interesting analysis of the Evans
case by attempting to see to what extent improved legislation in England
(PACE) would hypothetically have made a difference in preventing a miscarriage
of justice had it been in existence at the time. The conclusion is that the