Dealing with vulnerable suspects in police interviews

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Introduction

2. Dealing with vulnerable suspects in police interviews based on the Avery Case
2.1 Theoretical frame
2.1.1 Basics of Forensic Linguistics
2.1.2 The Origins of Forensic Linguistics
2.1.3 The Advancement of coercive police interviewing methods
2.1.4 The Reid Technique
2.2 Sample Text Analysis
2.2.1 The Avery Case
2.2.2 Analysis of Brendan Dassey’s Interrogation

3. Conclusion

4. Bibliography

1. Introduction

Since the beginning of time, mankind was provided with a certain feeling of right and wrong, a conscience. Due to the fact that it is based on social moral and ethical standards, it leads us humans in the right direction and prevents us from doing something rejected by society and therefore being expelled. To make people abide by the regulations given, laws were established and combined with a specific penalty for the violation of each. As exceptions prove the rule, there have always been people who had little to no moral feeling and therefore did harm to others. To handle such individuals, society established executive institutions, like the police, to investigate on a crime, and judicial institutions, like a court of law, to prosecute them for their crimes in order to maintain the function of society. Since the characteristic and mental features of every human are unique and special, every human being has different reasons to behave like he or she does. Therefore, there cannot be a general punishment for each crime without paying attention to why and how a crime has been committed. Due to this fact, the penalties were suited to the criminal’s motive and the conduction of the crime. Did it happen in some kind of very emotional state and is to be seen as a knee-jerk reaction, or have the crime and its conduction been planned meticulously? Furthermore, there cannot be a general way of interrogating possible suspects because every person’s mind functions in a different way and is therefore more or less vulnerable during police interviews. There is a range of very vulnerable people which can easily be manipulated. These include individuals who are traumatized, less intelligent or mentally disabled as well as children and juveniles. All of these people have to be treated very carefully during a police interrogation.

To raise more awareness on this sensitive subject, this paper is going to deal with how policemen carry out suspect interrogations in order to obtain a suspect’s confession. Special attention is dedicated to the so called ‘vulnerable suspects’, which should be treated with a lot of care and sensitivity while conducting police interviews. In reality, some interrogation methods used by the police include accusations and are coercive, which tends to force vulnerable suspects to confess to a crime he or she has never committed. The consequences an innocent suspect has to face due to a forced confession can be far-reaching and, in the worst case, deadly.

In order to go more into detail, the following main section is subdivided into two main parts. The first one serves as an introductory part in which the theoretical frame of this paper is to be constructed. At first, there will be some basic information on the field of forensic linguistics and its origins. This explanatory section will contain definition approaches of the discipline of forensic linguistics and furthermore point out when and how it first came up and how it has developed since then. In addition, the wide range this discipline covers will be examined in more detail. The second chapter in this section will give an overview of the development of police interviews regarding its early approaches until now. Furthermore, this paragraph will also deal with the methods used by policemen in order to make a suspect confess, the interrogation techniques. Particular attention will be payed to the so-called ‘third degree’ methods and the ‘Reid Technique’, as well as the arising problem of false confessions, which is going to be pointed out in the last point of the explanatory part.

The second part of the main section serves as a practical part in which the before explicated theoretical frame will be applied to a selected sample text. At first, this paper will exemplify the worst case result of forced confessions. Based on some of the most popular cases up until now, the for the affected person very harmful or even deadly consequences of miscarriages of justice will be demonstrated. In the first paragraph, the paper will give an overview of the Steven Avery Case. This highly controversial case is a textbook example for miscarriage of justice and therefore is center of the Netflix series Making a Murderer. Following that, there will be an analysis of some selected parts of the police interrogating Brendan Dassey, Avery’s juvenile nephew and the principal witness in his trial, whose statements finally put both into prison.

2. Dealing with vulnerable suspects in police interviews based on the Avery Case

As mentioned in the introductory part, this main section is divided into two parts. The first contains the theoretical frame this paper is based on, the second an analysis of some selected extracts of one of Brendan Dassey’s police interrogation. The first part will convey basic knowledge in order to make the second, analytic part more easily comprehensible.

2.1 Theoretical frame

In the following, basics of forensic linguistics as well as its origins will be pointed out and explained. Furthermore, there is to be found an explanatory section on the advancement of coercive police interviewing techniques and the so-called ‘Reid Technique’ which is the most popular interrogation technique based on psychological coercion. At the end of this section, problems regarding false confessions obtained by using the Reid Technique will be pointed out.

2.1.1 Basics of Forensic Linguistics

There are a lot of different approaches to define Forensic Linguistics, since this field concerns so many sub-areas and therefore has a “multidisciplinary nature” (Gibbons/Turell 2008: 1). Guy Cook defines Forensic Linguistics as “the deployment of linguistic evidence in criminal and other legal investigations, e.g. to establish the authorship of a document, or a profile of a speaker from a tape-recording” (Cook 2003:128). John Olsson, the self-proclaimed “world’s only full-time forensic linguist” (Olsson 2009: 1) states in his work Forensic Linguistics that “[f]orensic linguistics is the analysis of language that relates to the law, either as evidence or as legal discourse” (Olsson/Luchjenbroers 2014: 1) and thereby presents an easier understandable definition of this comprehensive concept.

Forensics is a very interesting branch of linguistics which concerns a lot of sub-areas that are all related to legal issues. This can be seen in Gibbons’ and Turell’s introductory chapter to their book Dimensions of Forensic Linguistics, where they say that “[m]ajor areas of study include: the written language of the law, particularly the language of legislation; spoken legal discourse, particularly the language of court proceedings and police questioning” (Gibbons/Turell 2008: 1). According to Gibbons and Turell, forensic linguistics also concentrates on “the social justice issues that emerge from the written and spoken language of the law; the provision of linguistic evidence, which can be divided into evidence on identity/authorship, and evidence on communication; the teaching and learning of spoken and written legal language; and legal translation and interpreting” (Gibbons/Turell 2008: 1). Focusing the wide range of areas Forensic Linguistics deals with, Coulthard and Johnson state that the “included topics [are] as diverse as handwriting analysis, forensic phonetics and [the] role of the linguist as an expert in court” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 6).

In his book Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language, Crime and the Law, Olsson provides his readers with a list enumerating the different disciplines of Forensic Linguistics. Besides the self-explanatory ‘authorship identification’, he also mentions ‘mode identification’ which denotes the determination of how a text was produced, for example through writing, speech or a combination of both of these possibilities. Another aspect is ‘legal interpreting and translating’ which means the interpretation and translation of legal documents and is practiced for courtrooms, the police or defendants. One more subject Olsson touches on is the ‘language and discourse of courtrooms’ which simply means the analysis of the language used in a courtroom, as well as their relationship to each other. One more discipline is called ‘language rights’ and deals with the linguistic rights of minority groups in different cultures where their own language is dominated by another one as well as people who don’t even have a language. Other aspects are ‘statement analysis’ which deals with witness statements with regard to their accuracy, and the so-called ‘forensic phonetics’ which denotes the analysis of audio-material for different legal purposes. The last discipline Olsson mentions is the ‘textual status’ by which the authenticity of a text or audio-material is determined (cf. Olsson 2004: 4-5).

In his work Forensic Linguistics, Olsson differentiates between ‘language in evidence’ and ‘language as legal discourse’. According to him, “[l]anguage in evidence includes the attribution of authorship and the interpretation of meaning. Language as legal discourse includes the language of statutes, judicial deliberations, the discourse of the court room and the discourse of exchanges between lawyers and others outside the court room” (Olsson/Luchjenbroers 2014: 1). John Olsson also refers to the multidisciplinarity of this linguistic field by stating that “[f]orensic linguistics is not a single science or study, but an umbrella discipline composed of many facets” (Olsson/Luchjenbroers 2014: xvi). Furthermore he points out that, based on the variety of sub-areas this discipline contains, “any forensic linguistic inquiry or investigation can draw upon any branch of theoretical or applied linguistics in order to analyse the language of some area of human life which has relevance to the law, whether criminal or civic” (Olsson/Luchjenbroers 2014: xvi). That forensic linguistics deals with so many different issues, according to Olsson, is due to the fact that “[i]nquiries range from authorship attribution to intellectual property matters, from the interpretation of meaning to the disambiguation of a poor audio recording to plagiarism” (Olsson/Luchjenbroers 2014: xvi). Malcom Coulthard and Alison Johnson also refer to Forensic Linguistics as a “multi- and cross-disciplinary field” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 6) since it is based on many different disciplines, such as “linguistics, law, psychology, anthropology and sociology” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 6).

2.1.2 The Origins of Forensic Linguistics

Nowadays, Forensic Linguistics is used in order to solve cases that could hardly be more diverse. As stated above, this discipline is used from authorship over speaker identification to forensic phonetics and many more. As different as the inquiries are, as different are the possibilities forensic linguistics provides. Nevertheless, this multidisciplinary field of linguistics has not always been as popular as it is today.

In 1949, Frederick Arthur Philbrick mentioned the term “forensic English” in his book Language and the Law: the Semantics of Forensic English for the first time, but the phrase never made it into specialist jargon. Eventually, in 1968, the Swedish linguist Jan Svartvik published his work The Evans Statements: A Case for Forensic Linguistics and thereby created a new forensic field (cf. Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 5).

In its beginnings, this newly established field of forensic expertise grew rather slowly but occasionally, publications of articles in which studies and analyses of controversial confessions were conducted, occurred (cf. Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 5). Since there was “no attempt to establish a discipline of, or even a methodology for, forensic linguistics – the work was usually undertaken as an intellectual challenge and almost always required the creation, rather than simply the application, of a method of analysis” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 5). However, in the past 24 years, the field of forensic linguistics has enjoyed a rapid upswing and is now a firm and widely used component in linguistic expertise. As a result, more and more courts count on linguists to testify their expert view in the witnesses stand (cf. Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 5). Furthermore, two renowned “associations, the IAFL (International Association of Forensic Linguists) and the IAFPA (International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics)” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 6) have been established. In 1994, a journal called Forensic Linguistics was founded and even “renamed in 2003 as the International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, in order to indicate more clearly to potential readers the wider definition of forensic linguistics” (Coulthard/Johnson 2007: 6).

As mentioned above, the term ‘forensic linguistics’ was named for the first time in Jan Svartvik’s work on the Evans Case, hence “he is credited with being the ‘father’ of the discipline” (Olsson 2009: 2). Thus it appears that the case of the illiterate Timothy John Evans who “confessed to the murder of [his] wife and […] their baby” (Olsson 2009: 2) was the first criminal case solved using forensic linguistics. The sad story began with Evans entering the local police station and telling the police officers “‘I want to give myself up. I have dispose of my wife.’” (Svartvik 1968: 7). According to Svartvik, “[t]his brief statement was the beginning of a series of events that will forever be remembered in criminal history” (Svartvik 1968: 7). Olsson added that “[f]orensic linguistics comes into the story at this point because Evans was supposed to have given several statements to the police confessing to the crime” (Olsson 2009:1). Linguist Jan Svartvik examined these statements, in which Evans confessed to having murdered his wife and baby daughter, in order to find out which confession is the right one and how the incident in question really happened. In the preface of The Evans Statements, Svartvik stated that he wanted to be the one doing the analysis because “it has provided the linguist with one of those rare opportunities of making a contribution that might be directly useful to society” (Svartvik 1968: preface). Concerning Forensic Linguistics as such, he stated that “it has highlighted our present inadequate knowledge of how language is used in various situations” (Svartvik 1968: preface).

During his analysis of Evans’ confession statements Svartvik noticed “that these statements include a large number of features that are not expected in the language of an illiterate, as well as remarkable internal differences of style” (Svartvik 1968: 19). These immense discrepancies caused Ludovic Kennedy, author of Ten Rillington Place, to state that, in his opinion, “both these ‘confessions’ are demonstrably false” (Kennedy 1961: 104). Nevertheless, Timothy John Evans “was found guilty partly on the basis of the statements and party on the basis of evidence given by John Christie. Evans was hanged in 1950” (Olsson 2009: 1).

Later on, John Christie reported the discovery of a “partly clothed woman’s body. When police arrived at the house they found evidence of several other murders” (Olsson 2009: 2). In consequence, Christie was “tracked down, charged, found guilty and later hanged. Not long before he died he confessed to the murder of Evan’s wife and ‘probably’ of their baby” (Olsson 2009: 2). This outcome makes the hanging of Timothy John Evans one of the most dreadful miscarriages of justice the world has ever seen.

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