Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

50 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
nine cases did Baldwin attribute the change to the persuasive skills of the
interviewer.
The findings suggest that most suspects enter the police interview having
already decided whether or not to make a confession or a denial. For this reason
most of the interviews tended to be very short. Typically, this involved the
interviewer asking the suspect to tell his story and then this was followed
up by a few questions to clarify basic details. Where there was a denial very
few suspects went from a complete denial to a complete confession. Baldwin
concluded:
In very few taped interviews, then, are suspects persuaded to admit participation
in criminal offences. The great majority of suspects stick to their starting
position—whether admission, denial, or somewhere in between—regardless of
how the interview is conducted. The simple truth is that it is extremely difficult to
induce reluctant suspects to confess by methods that would nowadays be regarded
acceptable. Yet many police officers and legal commentators continue to view the
‘art of persuasion’ as being the essence of police interviewing. Much public concern
about miscarriages of justice is the product of such ‘persuasive interviewing’ techniques,
however, and it is surely time that such techniques were outlawed. Enough
is known about the causes of miscarriages of justice to demonstrate that, if the
risk of their occurring is to be minimized, then such tactics have to be eliminated
(Baldwin, 1993, p. 333).
These are strong words indeed. The problem is that there is a fine balance
between the need for the police do their job effectively, which includes being
able to obtain detailed and reliable accounts from suspects, and the protection
of the suspect from persuasive questioning and possible involuntary
self-incrimination. Relentless and coercive questioning is clearly unacceptable
within the legal framework of PACE and obtaining a confession should not
be a convenient short-cut to a criminal investigation. However, Baldwin himself
clearly highlights the problems involved in determining what is a coercive
interview:
The tapes are, then, of limited utility in they offer no way of examining the social
context (or the social ‘construction’) of interrogation. There is in consequence
an almost limitless number of ways of making sense of them. Questioning which
a psychologist might regard as overbearing or coercive might well be seen very
differently by a lawyer attending an interview or by the police officer conducting
the interview. Such assessments cannot be made objectively since there is no consensus
about what constitutes a ‘good’ or an ‘effective’ interview. Such qualities
are largely in the eye of the beholder. What a police interviewer regards as a good
or successful interview is not necessarily what a lawyer, or civil libertarian, or
researcher, still less a suspect, would see as such (Baldwin, 1993, p. 328).
Finally, since so many of the officers in Baldwin’s study were judged as poor and
inept interviewers, we do not know whether more skilful interviewers would
have been able to change more of the initial denials to a full confession by using
legally acceptable interview techniques. Or do suspects only move from a denial
to a confession through coercive questioning? This is an important issue, which
will be taken up again in later chapters.