Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

CHAPTER 3
Persons at Risk During Interviews
in Police Custody: the Royal
Commission Studies
The British government set up the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice immediately
following the successful appeal of the ‘Birmingham Six’ on 14 March
1991. The terms of reference required the Commission to
. . . examine the criminal justice system from the stage at which the police are
investigating an alleged or reported criminal offence right through to the stage at
which a defendant who has been found guilty of such an offence has exhausted his
or her rights to appeal (Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, 1993, p. 1).
The Commission’s report took two years to complete. A total of 22 research
studies had been commissioned as a part of the report. A number of these
studies are cited in this book. This chapter includes a study by my colleagues
and I, which directly examined the psychological vulnerabilities of persons detained
at police stations through a clinical interview and psychometric testing.
Gudjonsson et al. (1993) investigated empirically, for the first time anywhere
in the world, the psychological characteristics and vulnerabilities of persons
detained at police stations for questioning. It remains the only study that has
gone beyond observational research.
The study was subsequently extended to investigate the relationships between
different types of psychological vulnerability (Gudjonsson, Clare &
Rutter, 1994; Gudjonsson, Rutter & Clare, 1995), the interview tactics used
by the police (Pearse & Gudjonsson, 1996a) and the factors that predicted the
likelihood of a confession (Pearse et al., 1998). These studies will be reviewed
in this chapter.
In addition, I shall briefly review another study that Isabel Clare and I
carried out for the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, which focused on
Devising and Piloting an Experimental Version of the Notice to Detained Persons
(Clare & Gudjonsson, 1992). This study is important, because it demonstrated
how difficult it is for intellectually disadvantaged persons to read and understand
written material pertaining to their legal rights.