Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

The English Law on Confessions 269
This judgment was in spite of the fact that the judge clearly thought that the
police had dealt with Mr S ‘in an impeccably fair and considerate way’. Thus
In the course of the interviews these officers were, in my judgment, extremely
careful to avoid long, oppressive, complicated, or leading questions and they, as
far as I can tell, did their utmost to avoid asking questions which were suggestive
of the answers that they wished to be heard.
The main basis of the judge’s ruling was as follows.
1. The two doctors, at the time of their assessment, had failed to approach
‘the question of fitness on the basis of considering whether or not any answers
given by Mr S . . . to any questions asked of him by the police officers
were necessarily reliable’. Instead, the two doctors had ‘considered that the
ordeal and stress and strain of being interviewed, particularly on such a serious
charge as this, was something that in their judgment the suspect could
sustain without suffering any consequential harm to either his physical or
mental health’.
2. The judge discussed the psychological evidence in detail and it formed the
basis on which the judge ruled the police interview statements inadmissible
(see Gudjonsson, 1995c, for details).
3. The judge accepted that Mr S was incapable of appreciating or understanding
the full impact of the caution properly administered at the outset and
beginning of each interview.
4. The judge concluded that the jury would find it impossible, even if they had
the benefit of expert evidence and the appropriate warning that he would
otherwise have given, to make sense of Mr S’s comments in the interviews.
The case raised a number of important issues. Most importantly, the case provides
a potential conceptual framework for the assessment of ‘fitness for interview’.
Prior to PACE, doctors attending police stations tended to focus on
‘fitness for detention’ and paid insufficient attention to ‘fitness for interview’.
This has now changed. The trial judge rightly pointed out that the term ‘fitness
for interview’ does not appear in PACE and there are no standard criteria by
which to assess it. This is a serious omission, which should be amended by the
Home Office in their revision of PACE and the current Codes of Practice. Interestingly,
fitness for interview was not an issue that was specifically addressed
by the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice (Runciman, 1993), but recently
a Working Group was set up by the Home Office to address this issue (Home
Office, 2001).
The present case suggests that the criteria used by judges in the future to
determine fitness for interview are likely to be very stringent. The trial judge
came to the firm conclusion that the term does not mean that ‘a person must
be shown to be capable of understanding or dealing properly and accurately
with questions put to him’, because this is adequately dealt with by various
provisions within PACE and its Codes of Practice for special groups considered
to be vulnerable or ‘at risk’ during interviewing. This includes the presence of
an appropriate adult during interviews and a warning to the jury by the judge
about the defendant’s vulnerabilities.