Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

608 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
the result of what happened up there that night—the implication here is
that if Mr A confessed and gave an account the sentence would be less,
which amounts to an inducement consistent with pragmatic implications
in the Kassin–Neumann (1997) model.
Mr A’s legal advocate failed to provide him with the support that he needed
during the interrogation sessions. In fact, there are a number of entries in the
officers’ notebooks that indicate that the solicitor colluded with the police in
extracting a confession from his client. This appears to have been due to the
solicitor being persuaded by the police that his client was guilty of the murder
and their failure to provide him with essential documents in the case.
REPRESSION AND PSYCHOGENIC AMNESIA
It appears from officer E’s notebook that he thought Mr A had repressed the
memory for the murder and needed assistance to bring it into consciousness.
During the police interviews in 1995 and in January 1997, Mr A appeared
firm in his belief about his movements on 6 May 1995. He claimed to have
arrived home shortly after midnight, and this was confirmed by his parents.
There was no evidence to indicate that immediately after the murder Mr A had
a memory loss for the material time (i.e. around the time the murder was committed).
During the inordinately long police interviews in February 1997 Mr A
appeared to have gradually developed memory problems and uncertainties concerning
his alibi, which are fundamental in understanding his confession to the
murder of his cousin.
There are three possibilities concerning Mr A’s apparent memory problems
for the events on 6 May 1995, when the murder took place. First, Mr A fully
remembered committing the murder, but he was unwilling or unable to admit
to it until being assisted to do so by officer E. In other words, he was faking
amnesia. There was no evidence to support this and it is an extremely unlikely
scenario.
The second possibility is that Mr A had genuine amnesia for the murder
due to a mechanism of repression, which slowly recovered over time during his
conversations and interviews with the police. This was clearly the police view.
This is based on the unlikely assumption that Mr A had ‘recovered memories’ of
the murder during his interviews with officer E, which might have been either
true or false memories of events. The problem here is that his apparent amnesia
did not follow all of the characteristics typically found for psychogenic amnesias
(Kopelman, 1995). That is, Mr A was apparently not psychotic and delusional
at the time of the murder and he was not intoxicated with alcohol (in a study of
amnesia and major crime in Iceland alcohol intoxication was a very important
variable; see Gudjonsson, Petursson, Skulason & Sigurdardottir, 1989).
Mr A did fulfil one of the features commonly associated with psychogenic
amnesia in that he did know the victim, although this does not appear to have
been a close emotional relationship. In addition, there was never any suggestion
of Mr A having amnesia about the murder until he had been extensively