Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

314 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
jointly on many cases with psychiatrists and often our individual contributions
have complemented one another’s very well indeed.
Three sources of information are potentially useful for the reconstruction
of the defendant’s mental state at the time of the police interrogation. First,
the Custody Record needs to be scrutinized for information such as visits by
relatives, a forensic medical examiner or police officers. Refusal to accept food or
an inability to consume it may be noted in the Custody Record. In addition, note
should be made of recorded sleep disturbance, which may include police officers
going into the suspect’s cell late at night or general sleeplessness. The less the
suspect has been able to sleep, whether due to interruptions or sleeplessness,
the less rested he or she is going to be when subsequently interrogated.
The second source of information is the accused. A detailed interview will
give an insight into his or her mental and physical state at the time of confinement
and interrogation. The reporting of various mental symptoms, including
lack of appetite, disturbed sleep, nightmares, severe anxiety, a disturbed mood,
specific phobic symptoms and hallucinations, may be important in terms of
evaluating the reliability of self-incriminating admissions. Physical pain or discomfort
may be similarly important.
I have come across two cases where the stress of confinement resulted in
apparent hallucinations. In both cases the accused felt that the doors, the walls
or the ceiling in the cell were moving in on them. In one of the cases, the accused
reported the cell door moving like rubber and this caused him great distress.
The third source of potential information are people who visit the accused at
the police station before or after interrogation. Relatives, friends or doctors, just
to mention a few potential informants, are often able to give useful information
about the likely physical and mental state of the accused. The role of forensic
medical examiners is particularly important, although they do not have psychiatric
training and would generally not be in a position to carry out a detailed
mental state examination on the accused. Wood and Guly (1991) have drawn
our attention to the potential dangers of failing to scrutinize the reliability of
unsubstantiated confessions among mentally disordered patients.
On occasion, police officers may provide an important insight into the mental
and physical state of the accused. For example, in one case a police officer
reported that the accused had physically collapsed and fainted, on the way to a
detention room, after being told that he was suspected of being involved in his
mother’s death. This corroborated the account the accused gave me about the
distress he experienced at the accusation that he had murdered his mother. His
distress was further augmented during subsequent interrogations when he was
repeatedly accused by the interrogators of having neglected and badly treated
his mother whilst she was alive. Following the accusations the son admitted to
having suffocated his mother to death. At his trial the judge refused to allow the
confession statements in evidence and accused the two police officers concerned
of having bullied a murder confession out of him.
Any information obtained from the accused must, whenever possible, be supported
or corroborated by other evidence, because it is essentially self-serving.
Irrespective of whether people are guilty or innocent of the crime they are
accused of, they may deliberately lie or misrepresent the facts as a way of