Interrogations-and-Confessions-Handbook

68 A Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions
sober up before the police interviewed them. It seems from our study that since
the implementation of PACE far fewer detainees are interviewed by the police
if they are obviously under the influence of alcohol.
Not every detainee who was found to be in an abnormal mental state required
the presence of an appropriate adult in accordance with PACE. An appropriate
adult is there to provide special assistance to detainees who are ‘at risk’ of providing
an unreliable statement due to their impaired mental state or capacity
(see Chapter 10). Taking into consideration those who were identified on the
basis of the clinical interview alone as mentally disordered, illiterate or having
language problems, a conservative estimate, according to the researchers, is
that 15% of the total sample interviewed by the police fulfilled the PACE criteria
for the presence of an appropriate adult (admittedly the criteria given in the
PACE Codes of Practice are poorly defined operationally and the researchers
were principally using their clinical judgement in line with PACE). This is obviously
much higher than the 4% whom the police identified as needing an appropriate
adult. Taking into account the findings from the psychological tests,
in addition to the clinical interview evaluation, the instances of need for an
appropriate adult rise considerably above the 15% figure and the true figure
probably lies in the region of 25%.
A small minority (7%) of detainees were suffering from mental illness, such
as severe depression or schizophrenia, and were sufficiently disabled to require
the presence of an appropriate adult as recommended by the PACE Codes of
Practice. Most were not identified by the police as being mentally ill. An appropriate
adult was requested in only four (33%) out of the 12 cases where mental
illness had been identified by the researchers. Most of the remaining suspects
would not have been readily identified as mentally ill without a brief clinical
interview. The detainees with a history of schizophrenia were most readily identified
by the police. It was the depressed detainees, some of whom were actively
suicidal at the time of their detention, whom the police most commonly failed
to identify as vulnerable. In addition, the three suspects who had severe language
problems did not have an appropriate adult or an interpreter present
during the police interview, even though their difficulties would have been easy
to identify.
On the basis of a clinical interview alone, only four (3%) suspects were judged
by the researchers to be learning disabled. Two were identified by the police
and an appropriate adult was requested in both cases. On the basis of the IQ
scores obtained, having taken into account the circumstances and context of the
testing, there is no doubt that by observation alone over a short period of time,
proper identification of mild learning disability, even by trained clinicians, is a
very difficult task. There are three main reasons for this. First, many persons
with a significant intellectual impairment have reasonable social functioning
which may disguise their intellectual limitation (i.e. on superficial acquaintance
they appear normal). Deficient social functioning is much easier to identify than
an intellectual deficit, although it is more difficult to formally assess than IQ.
Second, some persons with learning disability see their handicap as private and
would not tell the police about it and may even deliberately disguise it as far as
they are able to. Third, even when social functioning is significantly impaired,