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This chapter examines false-memory phenomena in adult witness interviews and in eyewitness identification of suspects. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first section contains examples of police interviews of victims, witnesses, and suspects in a typical case. It presents an overview of the centrality of police interviews in criminal investigation and the dilemmas posedt, and it ends with a discussion of the suggestive properties of such interviews as they are found in police interviewing protocols, such as the widely used Reid technique. The second section begins with an overview of the basic methods used to secure eyewitness identifications in the field, accompanied by recent statistics on the reliability of such identifications. It continues with a taxonomy of 24 factors — some of which are storage factors, retrieval factors, forgetting factors, and enduring characteristics of witnesses — whose effects on the reliability of eyewitness identifications have been established in experiments. The section concludes with two sets of research-based guidelines for eyewitness identifications, one promulgated by a leading scientific society (American Psychology and Law Society) and the other by the US Department of Justice, both aimed at reducing the incidence of false memory responses in eyewitness identification.

Interviewers in criminal investigations engage suspects in forensic questioning to transform from unsettled to settled ‘the facts’ in relation to alleged crimes. In questions such as “Are you saying xxx?” or “You say xxx” officers challenge suspects’ versions of events, treating them with doubt and disbelief to transform their accounts and ‘fix’ the facts for the record. Combining insights from previous research on reported speech, formulations, and gesture, the chapter looks not just at what is done in these questions but how actions of settling on agreed evidential facts are accomplished through the coordination of the reported talk with bodily interaction. Two video-taped police interviews are examined, to understand how institutional practices of evidence production are multimodally accomplished, through synchronizing embodied action and speech. Focusing on a micro-analysis of the linguistic environment of the verb SAY, the chapter shows how facts and their denial are multimodally co-constructed. While current monomodal interview records produced for linguistic analyses or summarized for court cases, ignore or overlook the multimodal, the analysis shows that implications for the justice system are that evidence is compromised. Dramatized multimodal formulations produce more powerful evidence for both prosecution and defense than logocentric ones.

This chapter discusses leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. The chapter situates the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process, and explores key concepts that are particularly relevant to, and addressed in, the chapters of this volume, such as those intersecting discourse and the institutional, psychological, ethnolinguistic, and metalinguistic. The chapter also provides an overview for the various sections and chapters in the volume. It concludes with suggestions and recommendations, based on the volume’s findings, for future areas of research.

This chapter examines identity-related categories that emerge in a post-sting operation interview between an undercover officer (and his colleague) and a high-profile detainee, who had allegedly solicited sexual activity in a public bathroom. Using the Membership Categorization Analysis approach, we show how officer and detainee use identity categories and predicates to perform actions, including providing accounts, making accusations and denials, and eliciting a confession. Drawing on morally-implicative, physical and institutional categorical resources, the speakers support their own version of events and reject the conflicting version preferred by the other.

This chapter addresses the case of a sixteen-year old girl, Mary Martin, who accused her father of sexually molesting her while she was in elementary and high school. Since the acts were committed years ago, the police used three specific time markers in order to help Mary remember what happened. It also considers the possibility that Mary accused her father upon the encouragement of her mother, who was still angry with her husband about divorce. This chapter takes a look at Mary's police interview, the four confrontation calls with her father, and the interview with one of Mary's childhood friends.

This chapter presents an analysis of investigative interviews with victims of reported sexual abuse. The data analyzed are 19 videotapes of interviews from archived cases involving complainants with intellectual disabilities. In particular, the chapter compares what is recommended in UK national guidelines to ‘achieve best evidence’ in such victim interviews and, on the basis of conversation analysis, how police officers adhere to and depart from recommended practice in ways which are both effective and less effective. The analysis reveals a restricted sense of rapport, and occasional use of questions implying blame. The chapter considers the implications of the analysis for published guidelines for interviewing victims and witnesses as well as for the training of officers and those who work with vulnerable adults and children to achieve a fair and supportive criminal justice system.

This chapter discusses a case where a drunken teenage girl was sexually molested by her stepfather. It considers that the police interview of the stepfather was classically flawed, because not only was the interviewer biased in his assumptions, the police failed to represent accurately what the suspects and witnesses said. It then studies the stepfather's schema during his conversations with the girl's mother (his ex-wife), including his intonation. This chapter also looks at the police's request for directives, which can lead the suspect to mention incriminating information.

Intoxication by alcohol or drugs is not a legal defense, but when suspects’ mental capacities are besotted, their intoxication during police interviews can affect their voluntariness. Problems occur when police elicit what they believe to be a confession from a suspect who is still intoxicated. This was the situation in one of the three murder cases described in this chapter, Nevada v. Shelli Dewey. Despite this, linguistic analysis of the interview shows that the police did not actually elicit a confession from the suspect. The case of Florida v. Robert Alben was different, for when the police interviewed Alben, he admitted that at the time of the murder he was so drunk and unconscious that he had no memory of what happened. In Ohio v. Charles Lorraine, the suspect was Mirandized while on marijuana and antidepressants, leading the police to misunderstand his refusal to waive his rights.

Policing in England and Wales is founded on the principle of “policing by consent”: for policing to be effective, it must be done with consent. The consent required is most obviously communal yet depends on many individual, microscopic instances of consent requests. Following the ethical turn in social life, functioning policing depends on police personnel requesting and obtaining consent for such activities as processing people’s personal details and involving people in investigative procedures. This chapter examines requests for consent about these two police activities using examples drawn from police call handling and suspect interviews, respectively. The examples of consent presented reveal that consent exchanges, although frequently concerned with important matters, are simultaneously inadequate or even nonsensical in various ways. This chapter develops and explores the notion of tick-box consent to examine such exchanges.

In June 2007, US senator Larry Craig was arrested in a public restroom for disorderly conduct after an undercover police officer observed behavior by Craig that the officer believed constituted a solicitation of sex. This study, which deals with the discursive properties of a post-sting police interview, analyzes the progression of pragmatic moves of reformulation made by Craig—specifically how he refuses to consent to the officer’s account by reframing the events in the restroom as constituting a deceptive, coercive act on the part of the officer and reformulating critical incriminating details of the officer’s account as harmless, natural acts on Craig’s part. Of particular interest is Craig’s deployment of a hybrid version of Clayman’s (1993) notion of “reformulating the question” for strategic purposes.

Voluntariness becomes a critical legal issue when suspects are interviewed before or during custody as well as when they are questioned at trial. The law, describing voluntariness as intentional and unimpeded by outside influence, gives special attention to suspects who are mentally incapacitated, those who are impeded by alcohol or drugs, and those who are juveniles. This chapter describes the structure of the police interview, noting places where voluntariness can become problematic, not only during Miranda warnings but also in the entire interview itself. Also stressed is the need to electronically record all interviews in order for police to avoid criticisms of coercion and bias. The chapter introduces the cases described in the following three chapters.

Police interviews, hearings, and trials are emotionally charged events, yet laws pay little or no attention to the effect of emotion on the accuracy and ability of participants. Ironically, lawyers appeal to the emotions of jurors, but judges then warn jurors to be dispassionate. This chapter briefly reviews the status of suspects’ emotions in two murder cases. One case was that of a stolid accountant who came home from work and discovered his wife’s body on the kitchen floor. The 911 operator and the police believed that the man’s verbal reactions were not emotional enough for the horrible circumstances. In the second case, the police interviewer tried to convince a female suspect that she had witnessed the murder of her boyfriend but had suppressed her memories. Both cases stretched any concept of voluntariness beyond reasonable limits.

This chapter briefly outlines the history of the courts’ efforts to deal with mentally incapacitated suspects and then describes three murder cases involving suspects with varying degrees of mental incapacitation: Florida v. Jerry Townsend (severely incapacitated), Michigan v. Benjamin Hauswirth (moderately incapacitated), and Alaska v. Larry Gentry (mildly incapacitated). Although linguists are not qualified to provide opinions about mental incapacitation, analysis of the language used can offer linguistic support for opinions made by specialists in psychology. At issue in all three of these cases was the degree to which the three men voluntarily produced the language evidence used against them versus the clear evidence of law enforcement’s language manipulations to make them appear guilty.

This chapter reviews the attempted understandings and problems involving the legal concept of reasonable doubt, which by definition is based on jurors’ efforts to deal with the legal concepts of intentionality, predisposition, and voluntariness. Jury decisions of the fifteen murder cases are individually reviewed, and the linguistic tools used in each case are reprised, including speech events, schemas, agendas (via topics and responses), conversational strategies used by the police, and critical lexical, phonetic, and syntax ambiguities. The effects of linguistic assistance can never be measured precisely, but an effort is made to show when it seems to have been successful and when it was less so.

The Corrupt Foreign Practices Act was enacted to prevent American businesses from bribing foreign governments to get contracts. In a 2010 sting operation, Yoshi Cohen, whose company produced body armor, was one of twenty-one business officials investigated. His conversations fit the speech event of a business negotiation, while two agents tried to convert this into a bribery event. The agent’s agenda failed because Cohen flatly refused, staying with his agenda of selling body armor and bragging about its quality. The agents used hints of illegality to get Cohen to bribe a government official and to avoid getting an export license. Cohen used no speech acts of admitting past illegality, promised to do nothing illegal, and did not agree to bribe. The agents used conversational strategies of withholding information, blocking Cohen’s answers and changing the subject before Cohen could answer. Ambiguous lexicon and grammatical referencing also played a role.