Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

44 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
terrorist activities. Thirty subjects (50%) claimed to have requested access to
a solicitor and of these only seven (23%) were allowed access to one, but only
after having been in custody for more than 48 hours. This means that none of
the subjects were allowed access to a solicitor within 48 hours of arrest. All the
subjects were released by the RUC without being charged. Of the total sample,
35% claimed to have been pressured to provide in the future information about
the activities of others. Almost half (48%) of the sample alleged that they had
been subjected to verbal abuse by the police during their interrogation. Two
subjects claimed to have been physically beaten.
In his paper, Walsh quotes some official statistics, which indicate that the
great majority of suspects (89%) who were interrogated in 1980 in connection
with suspected terrorist activities were released without being charged. According
to Walsh, the corresponding figure for England and Wales, for all offences,
was between 10 and 20%.
Walsh’s main conclusion was that the RUC had failed to implement many of
the recommendations of the Bennett Committee, including the absolute right
of suspects to have access to a solicitor after having spent 48 hours in custody.
The Bennett Committee had been set up in 1978 to carry out an extensive official
inquiry into police interrogation in Northern Ireland, following allegations
that suspects were being beaten and tortured whilst in police custody. The allegations
resulted in international publicity and condemnation. The Bennett
Committee offered 64 principal conclusions and recommendations (Bennett
Committee, 1979).
There is a fundamental weakness in Walsh’s study in that the information of
the subjects about their arrest, interrogation and detention could not be verified
by either the official record or an independent source. Furthermore, the sample
selected was very small and may not have been representative of all those arrested.
However, it remains a matter of public record that in the early 1970s the
RUC were using interrogation techniques that amounted to torture (Shallice,
1974). Shallice argues that the techniques used in Ulster, which included isolation,
sensory deprivation, ‘hooding’ and other forms of torture, were aimed
at completely breaking the suspects’ resistance. As a result many suspects suffered
long-term mental effects (Shallice, 1974; Wade, 1972). Interestingly, the
Israeli General Security Services still use similar techniques as the RUC did
in the early 1970s to break down resistance among alleged terrorists (Conroy,
2000; Gudjonsson, 1995a; Human Rights Watch/Middle East, 1994).
RESEARCH AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KENT
Researchers at the University of Kent have carried out a number of projects
into police interrogation, which will be reviewed. The part of the work that
relates to confessions (Moston, Stephenson & Williamson, 1992, 1993) will be
discussed in detail in Chapters 5 and 6. The focus in this chapter is specifically
on police interrogation.
With the mandatory use of tape-recorded police interviews in England
it has become possible to study more objectively than before police–suspect
interactions and behaviour. Moston (1990a) argued that contemporaneous