Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

Psychological Vulnerability 461
In the cases where I testified, of what did the psychological evidence consist?
The answer is that it varied in all four cases, but in all instances it was
concerned with potentially challenging the reliability of the confession that
the defendants had made during the police interrogation. It did not focus on
the more technical issues such as the defendants’ understanding of their legal
rights (e.g. understanding of the police caution or the right to a solicitor).
The Full Scale IQs of the four defendants, as measured by the WAIS-R, were
65, 76, 78 and 93. Therefore, only one was functioning intellectually in the mental
handicap (learning disability) range. Two were borderline. The defendant
with the lowest IQ was the one who proved least suggestible and compliant
on testing. The critical evidence in court was his low intellectual abilities, and
this is what the defence focused on. The jury returned a not guilty verdict
after four hours of deliberation. At the other extreme, the brightest defendant
was most suggestible and compliant on testing. The prosecution objected to the
admissibility of the psychological evidence because of the defendant’s average
intellectual functioning, but the judge nevertheless allowed it in evidence. The
cross-examination of my evidence was most taxing in this case and lasted over
three hours. Most of the cross-examination was spent on my going over the
record of the police interviews. The defendant was acquitted by the jury in a
matter of a few minutes. The remaining two cases, where the defendants were
of borderline intellectual abilities, focused on their relatively low IQ and limited
reading ability. In addition, high acquiescence and difficulties in understanding
simple questions were focused on in one case; in the other it was the difficulty
in coping with interrogative pressure (high ‘Shift’ on GSS 1 and GSS 2) that I
was asked about in greatest detail.
The Murder Charges
Six defendants were charged with murder. Three were under the age of 17; that
is, they were juveniles as far as the English judicial system is concerned. The
charges against them with respect to murder were dismissed by the judge at
their trial in January 1987. One of them had not confessed to the murder during
interrogation; he was the only one of the six to be interviewed in the presence
of a solicitor and also his father. The evidence against him was that of a witness
who admitted in court during a voire dire that he had lied to the police. As a
result the prosecution withdrew the charge of murder and the judge directed
the jury to find him not guilty of murder. In the case of the second juvenile,
the judge ruled during the trial that the police’s behaviour during the interviews
had been oppressive and the confession was unreliable. The jury was
directed to find him not guilty. The third juvenile had his confession ruled inadmissible
by the judge after a clinical psychologist (Olive Tunstall) found that
he had not understood the police caution (Beaumont, 1987, 1988). The judge
directed the jury, who had heard the expert evidence, to find the defendant not
guilty.
The remaining three defendants, Winston Silcott, Mark Braithwaite and
Engin Raghip, were tried and convicted of murder, riot and affray. Raghip’s
defence solicitors had instructed a clinical psychologist for a pre-trial report,