How Trauma May Magnify Risk of Involuntary and False Confessions Among Adolescents

Empirical research on police interrogation has identified both personal and situational factors that increase criminal suspects’ vulnerability to involuntary, unreliable, or false confessions. Although trauma exposure is a widely documented phenomenon known to affect adolescents’ perceptions, judgments, and behaviors in a wide array of contexts (especially stressful contexts), trauma history remains largely unexamined by interrogation researchers and virtually ignored by the courts when analyzing a confession. This article argues that trauma may operate as an additional personal risk factor for involuntary and false confessions among adolescents by generating both additive and interactive effects beyond youths’ general, developmentally-driven vulnerabilities in police interrogations. First, we briefly review adolescent trauma symptomatology, emphasizing the heterogeneity of adolescents’ responses to trauma. Next, using Leo and Drizin’s (2010) “Three Errors” framework of police-induced false confessions, we systematically apply clinical findings to each of the three police errors—misclassification, coercion, and contamination—to outline the psychological mechanisms through which adolescents with trauma histories may be at increased risk for making involuntary or unreliable statements to police. Finally, we offer considerations for interrogation research, clinical forensic practice, police practices, and courtroom procedures that could deepen our understanding of trauma’s role in the interrogation room, improve the integrity of investigative and adjudicatory processes, and ultimately promote justice for adolescent suspects with trauma exposure.

Opening Pandora’s box: The right to silence in police interrogations and the Directive 2016/343/EU

This article examines the provisions of the Directive 2016/343 related to the right to remain silent with special emphasis on pre-trial proceedings and police interrogations. It focuses on the inherent contradictions and unclarities of the respective provisions, particularly when interpreted in light of the respective ECtHR case law. The article also identifies areas, relevant to regulation of suspect interrogations and the right to silence, which are not addressed in the Directive or the ECtHR jurisprudence. It concludes by critically assessing the likely effectiveness of the Directive provisions in ensuring the right to silence in criminal proceedings.

A Discursive Import of Suspects’ Affirmative Responses in Police-Suspect Interaction in Ibadan, Nigeria

Police-suspect interaction, henceforth PSI, has been examined from the linguistic and non-linguistic standpoints. Existing studies have interrogated the stylistic peculiarities of PSI without engaging the discursive import of suspects’ affirmative responses. Paucity of scholarly works on the discursive import of suspects’ affirmative responses has undermined the place of the suspect in PSI. It is against this background that this study interrogates the discursive import of suspects’ affirmative responses in PSI with a view to describing the contextual meanings of suspects’ affirmative responses during interrogation sessions. To engage how contextual dynamics ambiguate suspects’ affirmative responses to interrogation in PSI, the study adopts Grice’s (1975) cooperative principles as theoretical framework to interrogate the motivation behind suspects’ flouting of cooperative maxims in PSI. Recorded sessions of police interrogations on burglary and stealing, attempted rape, perversion of justice, kidnapping, conspiracy and felony and robbery at the State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department, Ibadan, constitute the data for the study. A discursive engagement of the recorded interrogation sessions reveals that suspects’ affirmative responses have multiple contextual meanings. This study contends that suspects’ affirmative responses do not express agreement in all contexts; suspects consciously flout conversational maxims to challenge investigating police officers’ (IPOs’) claims, seek continued attention, confirm their innocence, negate IPOs’ claims and initiate new discourse. The study submits that suspects’ deployment of the resourcefulness of their affirmative responses in contexts is geared towards seeking the path of exoneration. Suspects engage affirmative responses to enact discursive acts and power in PSI. The study recommends that further discursive enquiry should interrogate how resistance is created, managed and sustained by suspects in PSI.

Plain Language in Law in Hungary

Plain language movement has a long history and has achieved significant changes in the USA and in many European countries. However, the situation is not as good as that in Hungary, especially in the field of law. As a researcher in two empirical “law and language” projects in Hungary since 2000, the author presents her experiences gained during preparing and analysing tape recordings of police interrogations and court hearings as regards comprehension of legal language. The paper focuses especially on the understandability of providing information on the rights and obligations of laymen in legal procedures given by legal professionals. It also summarizes the recent changes in Hungarian legal regulations providing a better understanding of rights and obligations (partly based on the 2012/13/ EU Directive on the right to information in criminal proceedings). As regards the practice of adjudication, the paper compares the way of providing information to laymen before and after the modification of legal norms. Two positive examples can be mentioned: (1) a few years ago, a group of legal and linguistic experts prepared a so-called Stylebook with recommendations to improve the structure and wordings of court verdicts, and (2) within the framework of a project called The Year of Comprehensibility at Courts, 2017 the improvement of comprehensible communication was integrated into an obligatory training for judges.

Evidence-gathering in police interviews

In this paper I discuss the many complexities that police officers have to deal with in their communication with suspects. Investigative interviewing is a very complex communicative situation in itself, with a number of different psychological and sociological variables at play during each interview. In addition, suspect interviews bring about an additional dimension of complexity, which is driven by the fact that a basic principle of conversation, cooperation (Grice 1975) is often not respected and is sometimes severely and purposefully violated, for example when suspects are guilty and want to obscure that very fact or when they believe that their situation would worsen if they cooperated with the police. A further layer of complexity is added when the interviews are carried out via an interpreter, where the fact that the officer and the suspect speak different languages during the interview creates additional barriers to straightforward communication. In the present paper, I identify a number of points at which communication difficulties are encountered in this highly sensitive legal context. For this purpose, I analyse authentic interview datasets provided by two UK police constabularies, and also make comparisons with examples from transcripts of authentic US police interrogations. In addition, I highlight the issues that arise when professional interpretation is not available and when bilingual police officers assume the dual role of investigator-interpreter. Finally, I suggest possible solutions that can help remove the hurdles standing in the way of efficient and accurate gathering of communication evidence.

Slow Lies: Response Delays Promote Perceptions of Insincerity

Evaluating other people’s sincerity is a ubiquitous and important part of social interactions. Fourteen experiments (total N = 7565; ten preregistered; eleven in the main paper, three in the SOM; with U.S. American and British members of the public, and French students) show that response speed is an important cue on which people base their sincerity inferences. Specifically, people systematically judged slower (vs. faster) responses as less sincere for a range of scenarios from trivial daily conversations to high stakes situations such as police interrogations. Our findings suggest that this is because slower responses are perceived to be the result of the responder suppressing automatic, truthful thoughts, and fabricating a novel answer. People also seem to have a rich lay theory of response speed, which takes into account a variety of situational factors. For instance, the effect of response delay on perceived sincerity is smaller if the response is socially undesirable, or if it can be attributed to mental effort. Finally, we showed that explicit instructions to ignore response speed can reduce the effect of response speed on judgments on sincerity. Our findings not only help ascertain the role of response speed in interpersonal inference making processes, but also carry important practical implication. In particular, the present study highlights the potential effects that may be observed in judicial settings, since the response speed of innocent suspects may mislead people to judge them as insincere and hence guilty.