| Popis: |
Valuable information is often obtained from criminal suspects, and most will talk to the police even after being informed of their right to silence. Many confess, and confessions are one of the most powerful forms of evidence in the legal system. Hence, suspect interviewing can be an effective crime fighting tool. On the other hand, it is now widely agreed that some confessions are false. Many people do not find it credible that someone might confess to something they did not do, so even when confessions seem to be of questionable validity, defendants are sometimes convicted because of them. This means that what happens in a suspect interview can lead to a miscarriage of justice. One of the difficulties involved with conducting research on suspect interviewing is that when the police do allow access to actual suspect interviews, or to records of them, it may not be possible to obtain a representative sample. Another problem can be that researchers do not usually have much information about the background of either the suspect or the crime they are suspected of committing, which means that the interview records must be studied in isolation from these factors. Moreover, there seems to be a complicated interaction between many variables in a suspect interview, which makes it difficult to know how any of them shape the outcome. Isolating and controlling these variables cannot usually be done in a real suspect interview, and even if it could be, the generally high stakes associated with such situations mean that it might not be legal or ethical to do so. One way to avoid these problems is to conduct experiments where variables such as the strength of evidence, and the time at which it is disclosed, can be tightly controlled and manipulated, but this approach raises questions about poor generalisability of results due to differences between real world interviews and simulated ones. An alternative methodology is to question participants about their views on suspect interviewing, although this does not permit the manipulation of variables or the testing of hypotheses to be made. Although case evidence has probably always been one of the most powerful factors in a suspect interview, its role in this context has not been closely studied until recent years. Some questions, such as the best time to disclose evidence to a suspect, remain virtually unexplored. Therefore, in this thesis, the role of evidence in suspect interviewing was investigated and analysed from several perspectives. |
