Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

512 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
officers that he ‘might’ have been on the common on the day of the murder (i.e.
an internalized belief ). His implicating himself during the anonymous telephone
calls was clearly voluntary and undoubtedly functioned at the time to
enhance his sense of excitement and self-importance. Fell’s poor self-esteem,
which was clearly evident on psychometric testing and was corroborated by
background information, and his personality disorder, are undoubtedly important
in explaining his attention seeking behaviour.
CONCLUSIONS
In relation to disputed confession cases, the attitude of High Court judges to expert
psychological evidence and their level of sophistication in evaluating it has
greatly improved since 1988, when Lord Lane refused to hear my evidence in
the case of Engin Raghip. The successful subsequent appeal of Raghip in 1991,
and their Lordships’ ruling regarding the admissibility of expert psychological
evidence, was a landmark decision. The ruling has had an enormous impact
on the admissibility of psychological evidence in the lower courts as well as
on more recent Court of Appeal decisions. The next significant development
was the decision in Ward in 1992, which had implications for the admissibility
of both psychiatric and psychological evidence. Here a diagnosis of personality
disorder was influential in overturning a conviction in relation to terrorist
offences and 12 counts of murder.
In the appeal of David MacKenzie, their Lordships set three criteria for
determining the admissibility of confession evidence:
1. the prosecution case depends wholly upon confessions;
2. the defendant suffers from a significant degree of mental handicap;
3. the confessions were unconvincing to a point where a jury properly directed
could not properly convict upon them, then the judge, assuming he had not
excluded the confessions, should withdraw the case from the jury.
The judgment did not make it clear whether the term ‘mental handicap’
referred to his borderline IQ, a previous diagnosis relating to admission to
hospital or encapsulates all of MacKenzie’s mental (psychological) problems.
This is where the interpretation of the law and legal judgments becomes so
important. It is not just a matter of what the law says, or what is said in
the judgment of cases, it is really a question of how these are interpreted.
In the case of Long, this interpretation became important. Their Lordships
applied the criteria set out in MacKenzie. Long’s case met the first two criteria,
but not the third. His meeting the criteria for ‘mental handicap’ is particularly
interesting, because in psychiatry and psychology this term is normally
used to refer to learning disability, but in the case of Mr Long it was
applied to a condition relating to depression. Mr Long was of average intellectual
abilities, but at the time of the police interrogation he had suffered from
depression.
In the case of Kane, in the Royal Court of Justice in Belfast, their Lordships
ruled that expert testimony regarding a high level of anxiety proneness, which