Interrogation Room Research Articles

Interviewing and interrogation practices and beliefs, 20 years later: A national self-report survey of American police.

This survey examined current law enforcement beliefs and practices about interviewing and interrogation to gauge whether they have evolved given the research and training developed over the past 20 years. We hypothesized that police beliefs and practices would have evolved along with research findings over the past 20 years. We surveyed 526 law enforcement officers about the practices and beliefs regarding interviewing and interrogation. We asked questions about officers' beliefs about rates of true and false confessions, time spent in the interrogation room, beliefs about their ability to detect deception, training experience, practices of recording interrogations, and their self-reported use of interrogation techniques. Overall, when we compared our survey with Kassin et al.'s (2007) seminal survey, we found both similar results and evolving positive trends. The average interview was reportedly 1.6 hr, virtually no different from that in Kassin and colleagues' study. In addition, our sample reported that 26.2% of innocent suspects at least partially falsely confessed. Further, whereas Kassin and colleagues found that fewer than one in 10 interrogations were video recorded, we found that now more than half of interrogations are recorded in this way. In a geographically diverse sample of U.S. law enforcement officers, we found significant positive trends toward knowledge and practices informed by research generated over the past decades on interviewing and interrogation. Although causality could not be determined, these findings indicate an evolution of the U.S. law enforcement mindset in a more science-based direction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The effect of confession evidence on jurors' verdict decisions: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Over the past 4 decades, discrepant research findings have emerged in the juror-confession literature, prompting the need for a systematic review and meta-analysis that assesses the effect of confession evidence (coerced or noncoerced) on conviction rates and the efficacy of trial safeguards. We did not predict any directional hypotheses. Some studies show increased convictions when a confession is present (vs. not), regardless of whether that confession was coerced; other studies demonstrate that jurors are able to discount coerced confessions. Studies have also demonstrated sensitivity effects (safeguards aided jurors in making appropriate decisions), skepticism effects (safeguards led jurors to indiscriminately disregard confession evidence), or null effects with regard to expert testimony and jury instructions. We identified 83 independent samples (N = 24,860) that met our meta-analytic inclusion criteria. Using extracted Hedges' g effect sizes, we conducted both network meta-analysis and metaregression to address key research questions. Coerced and noncoerced confessions (vs. no confession) increased convictions (network gs = 0.34 and 0.70, respectively), yet coerced (vs. noncoerced) confessions reduced convictions (network g = -0.36). When jury instructions were employed (vs. not), convictions in coerced confession cases were reduced (this difference did not emerge for noncoerced confessions; a sensitivity effect). Expert testimony, however, reduced conviction likelihood regardless of whether a confession was coerced (a skepticism effect). Confession evidence is persuasive, and although jurors appear to recognize the detrimental effect of coercive interrogation methods on confession reliability, they do not fully discount unreliable confessions. Educational safeguards are therefore needed, but more research is encouraged to identify the most effective forms of jury instructions and expert testimony. One potential reform could be in the interrogation room itself, as science-based interviewing approaches could provide jurors with more reliable defendant statement evidence that assists them in reaching appropriate verdict decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The impact of alcohol intoxication and short-sighted decision making in the interrogation room.

The impact of alcohol intoxication and short-sighted decision making in the interrogation room.

Supplemental Material for The Impact of Alcohol Intoxication and Short-Sighted Decision Making in the Interrogation Room

Supplemental Material for The Impact of Alcohol Intoxication and Short-Sighted Decision Making in the Interrogation Room

Exploring the use of deictic expressions in police interrogations: A pragmatic perspective

People are in need to be provided with a number of approaches of understanding the nature and the relationship of the police interrogation between interrogators and suspects inside the interrogation room from a pragmatic point of view. Nevertheless, extracting the truth from the mouths of the suspects is not that easy task unless it is preceded by certain skills and strategies utilised by the detective to arrive at the confession and the judiciary evidences. The present paper deals with the concept of deixis of American police interrogations. What is more, the current study tries to answer the following questions: first, what are the types of deixis that are used in police interrogation? Second, what is the most frequent one that is used by both interlocutors. Third, what are the pragmatic functions of these uses? Moreover, the paper aims at investigating the deixis pragmatically and finding out to what extent their use could serve the process of interrogation and truth seeking and to survey the relevant pragmatic theory of deixis and certain account of the process of police interrogation. The methodology of this paper is based on Brown all the types of deixis. This paper concludes that: deictic expressions are heavily utilized between the interlocutors as a reference to the set of the events under discussion and they serve to locate every single detail of the events to be interrogated.

The Case of Adam Jacobsen. Enslavement in 18th-Century Norway

ABSTRACT The article explores the life of Adam Jacobsen, an enslaved man who was trafficked from the Danish West Indies to the small town of Arendal in southern Norway sometime around 1780. By using the micro-spatial perspective the article aims to investigate how Jacobsen and others who were trafficked from America, Africa and Asia to Europe were understood within the broader processes of marketization and racialization that occurred with the development of the Atlantic slave trade. The article examines how these processes were given a localized expression through investigations of different ‘sites’: the geographical places of St. Croix and, primarily, Arendal, and the institutional sites of the household and the interrogation room. In St. Croix, Jacobsen lived in a society constructed around plantation slavery. In Arendal, he was a working member of his owner’s household residing with local servants and a local family, but he was also singled out and often racialized. Jacobsen’s life story, then, demonstrates how colonial slavery extended into Europe in a way that not only concerned capital and goods but also trafficking of people.

Audio forensics behind the Iron Curtain: from raw sounds to expert testimony

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the construction of forensic audio expertise in the legal and security system of Communist Czechoslovakia and shows that the contested nature of speaker identification and sound-based objectivity contributed to the formulation of probabilistic claims in forensics. It explores the practices of the Department of Fonoscopy: a unique research laboratory of audio forensics that systematically examined the spectrographic, linguistic, and auditory means of sound analysis for the purpose of identifying unknown voices and environments in audio recordings. Bringing together the notions of “forensic cultures” and “sonic skills”, this article addresses the scientific, cultural, and political underpinning of the nascent field of audio expertise as well as the changing status of sound-based knowledge and forms of representation in forensics. In establishing fonoscopic expertise before the court and in the broader praxis of police investigation, the idea of vocal fingerprints and the use of sound visualisation technologies became instrumental. This essay pays special attention to the dynamics of the intricate process in which acoustic “raw material” (from anonymous calls, wiretapped phone lines, recorded conversations, or police interrogation rooms) was transformed into different kinds of legal and criminalistic evidence in the service of the totalitarian surveillance state.

Guilt assessment after retracted voluntary and coerced‐compliant confessions in combination with exculpatory or ambiguous evidence

AbstractWe investigated how voluntary confessions, coerced‐compliant confessions, and no‐confessions influenced guilt assessments in combination with other exculpatory or ambiguous evidence. In three experiments (total N = 808), participants studied case information and provided guilt assessments. As expected, in Experiment 1 and 2a, (i) voluntary confessions to protect a family member elicited stronger guilt attributions than no‐confessions and (ii) ambiguous evidence led to stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory evidence. In Experiment 2b, voluntary confessions to protect a group‐member (but not to protect a family‐member) elicited stronger guilt attributions than no‐confessions. Exculpatory eyewitness evidence elicited stronger guilt attributions than exculpatory DNA evidence and participants assigned more weight to exculpatory DNA than eyewitness evidence. Participants were able to discount coerced‐compliant confessions when they received information about the interrogations (Experiments 2a/b), but did not consistently consider risk factors for (voluntary) false confessions outside the interrogation room when assessing guilt.

Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant (review)

Reviewed by: Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies ed. by James Ryan and Susan Grant Claire Knight Ryan, James and Grant, Susan (eds). Revisioning Stalin and Stalinism: Complexities, Contradictions, and Controversies. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York, 2021. xiii + 250 pp. Notes. Select bibliography. Geoffrey Roberts select bibliography. Index. £90.00; £28.99; £26.09 (e-book). This volume accomplishes a rare feat: it combines fascinating new research with insightful stock-taking of the past several decades of Stalin-era political history scholarship, rendering it a worthy addition to the bookshelves of seasoned academics and fledgling students alike. The diverse chapters are united by a shared interest in themes of an international bent, showcasing the influence of transnationalism, postcolonialism and the modernity school on recent Soviet scholarship. The volume is divided into four sections, concentrating on Stalin as a leader, the cult of personality and the Cold War, with a final chapter on the afterlife of Stalinism in today's Russia. Part One is the most fully subscribed, opening with a chapter by Christopher Read on the recent explosion of scholarly biographies of Stalin, including his own, and offering a candid assessment of the value and limitations of the biography as a historical exercise. In chapter two, Peter Whitewood takes on misconceptions concerning the military purges in 1937, arguing convincingly that these developments were reactive rather than proactive, having more to do with the leadership's decades-long perception of the Red Army's vulnerability to enemy infiltration than Stalin's bid for power. In chapter three, Daniel Kowalsky offers a lively and comprehensive historiography of Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War, putting to rest 'the Orwellian [End Page 181] myth of swarms of Soviet illegals carrying out assassinations and sapping the Republic's moral[e]' (p. 62) once and for all. Chapter four by Chris Bellamy dovetails nicely with Whitewood's chapter, focusing on Stalin's capabilities as an intelligent, detail-oriented war leader and dispelling Khrushchev's tall tale of an isolated leader holed up in his dacha on the verge of nervous breakdown at the outbreak of the war: instead, Stalin was in his Kremlin office barely an hour after the first bombs were dropped on Crimea (p. 73). Part Two moves away from Stalin the man and onto the Stalin/Stalinist cult, with chapters by Judith Devlin, placing the cult in transnational context, and Balázs Apor, examining the Stalinist cult as but one in a series of leader cults that arose in twentieth-century Hungary. Both chapters abandon the well-trod path of Stalinist exceptionalism and underline instead the parallels and continuities between the Stalinist cult and other leader cults across space and time, making a valuable contribution to the broader, ongoing work on leader cults as a modern phenomenon. Part Three focuses on the Cold War, beginning with Caroline Kennedy-Pipe's enlightening historiography and thematic analysis of the conflict, in which she does not shy away from critiquing her own earlier work in a bid to provide a more global perspective on a topic that continues to be alarmingly relevant today. In contrast to the rest of the volume, chapter eight by Geoffrey Roberts concentrates on an aspect of Soviet policy in which Stalin had very little interest, namely, the peace movement. Roberts shows how the famed bureaucratism of the Stalinist system could prove advantageous at times, as it provided a mechanism by which those outside the inner circle might influence policy. Chapter nine by Molly Pucci steps outside the USSR and into the interrogation rooms of the Czechoslovak secret police, tracing the chilling way in which seemingly simple adjustments in the protocols for writing confessions served to Sovietize the Czechoslovak criminal justice system and systematize the fabrication of evidence in political cases. Finally, James Ryan's thorough, equable analysis of the seeming revival of Stalinism in state and society under Putin provides a fitting end to a volume dedicated to eschewing simplistic formulations and seductive myths in reconsidering the Stalin era. One of the key strengths of this collection lies in the wealth of historiographical analysis it provides both in the introduction, with its cogent, concise survey of...

Interrogation Room

Interrogation Room

The Truth Machines: Policing, Violence, and Scientific Interrogations in India

ABSTRACTHow do police get witnesses and criminal defendants to tell the truth? And in what ways do the truth‐seeking activities of law enforcement create and remake the identity of the state? These questions lie at the heart of Jinee Lokaneeta's fine book, The Truth Machines. For anthropologists of law and politics, the book offers a lens into the ways that nations try to prevent the torture of citizens, paradoxically by promoting a different kind of torture. It is a story of how state officials move torture from dusty police interrogation rooms into futuristic forensic laboratories and hospitals.

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.

Juveniles in the interrogation room: Defense attorneys as a protective factor.

Juveniles in the interrogation room: Defense attorneys as a protective factor.

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold HistoryThe Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold HistoryThe Hijacked War: The Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean War

\u201cAt Least I Tried\u201d: Swedish Police Officers\u2019 Experiences of Meeting with Women Who Were Raped

Interactions with police officers are of great importance as to how the reporting raped woman continues to process what has happened. The focus of this study was on police officers’ experiences regarding contact with women who report rape. Sixteen officers participated in focus groups, and the data were subjected to inductive thematic analysis. Participants stressed their wish to be supportive and empathic, but also their lack of support and prerequisites, e.g., lack of amenities in interrogation rooms. They felt frustrated and described their work as “trying” rather than succeeding. If unaddressed, such shortcomings risk negatively affecting both police officers and victims.

The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim

Reviewed by: The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim Grace Huxford The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: the Untold History by Monica Kim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 435. $35.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper, $35.00 e-book. Interrogation rooms sit at the heart of the history of the Korean War. By 1951, the conflict had shifted from a war of movement to one of stasis: the interrogation of prisoners of war (POWs) became a pivotal Cold War battleground. POWs from the United Nations (UN), China, and North Korea were subjected to wide-ranging interrogations not only by enemy forces but also, when they were released, by their own military authorities or by third parties seeking to situate them in the new postwar, postimperial world order. Interrogation revealed important military intelligence. How one responded to it could reveal, shape, [End Page 370] or even produce a sense of subjectivity, in the interrogated and interrogator alike. Interrogation rooms were thus critical to the wider Cold War battle over personhood. The Korean War, in particular, was always about individual people, their outlook, and the choices they made. Monica Kim’s innovative, imaginative, and ambitious book demonstrates the importance of the interrogation room and human interiority to the Korean War, in a way that few others have done before. Not only does Kim bring together an astonishing transnational range of Korean War interrogation rooms—from Koje-do (Kŏje 巨濟 Island), where communist North Koreans and strident anticommunists were interrogated by US forces and the Republic of Korea Army (ROKA), to the camps created by the Indian military on the thirty-eighth parallel for POWs refusing repatriation—but she also extends the temporal framework of interrogation. For example, chapter 1 explores the influence of the US Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) during the post-1945 US occupation of southern Korea. It examines how the bureaucratic, information-gathering, and intelligence systems imposed made “the ordinary Korean” learn well before 1950 “how to navigate different potential readings of his or her personhood by different groups” (p. 35). As Kim shows, CIC interrogations and the wider US occupation had a long-lasting legacy on Korean subjectivity. Kim also extends that chronology beyond the war, poignantly detailing in the final concluding chapter the post-1953 histories and “interior worlds” (p. 358) of individuals caught up in this battle. They carried these experiences with them beyond Korea, from São Paolo to Geneva and to Memphis, showing that this new type of warfare, much like the Korean War itself, never fully relinquished its grip on its former combatants. Personal stories occupy a central part in this book: these histories puncture established narratives of the Korean War and reflect the complex melee of subjectivities, political sensibilities, and nation-states that ran through the conflict. The book opens with Oh Se-hŭi, a captured twenty-year-old Korean People’s Army (KPA) deserter. Oh had four papers stowed away in different parts of his body, each of which would have offered him a different option if he had been caught by the ROKA (enrollment papers at Seoul University and a list of students he taught as a countryside middle-school teacher), UN (a leaflet offering safe surrender), or KPA (a “patriotic certificate”). When Oh was eventually confronted by a ROKA soldier, all his papers were torn up: Oh [End Page 371] was only taken prisoner due to the clearly unmilitary cut of his hair. Kim’s book is full of these fascinating and microcosmic examples, in which minds and bodies are “read” as much as documentation is. These life stories support Kim’s main argument about the importance of psyche and subjectivity in the Korean War. They highlight the relevance of personalities and decision-making in the conflict, which involved actors from the lowest private soldier, such as Oh, to the most senior general, such as General Francis Dodd (1899–1973), famously taken captive by POWs on Koje-do (explored in depth in chap. 4). Kim also shows how life narratives—how one’s origins were explained and understood—were critical in the interrogation room. As Aaron Moore demonstrates, autobiography has...

Child Interviewing in Legal Cases : A European Perspective

Child interviewing in legal cases is a multidisciplinary, multiprofessional topic that has been addressed as a following realisation, that accurate and eligible oral evidence, information or confession from children can only be obtained by a specific genre of interviews. Child development experts and researchers have advocated for specialised techniques for forensic child interviewing since the 80s and 90s, along with specialised police training and practice. In the European Union the last decade could rightly be called the decade of child-friendly justice. During these ten years several legal instruments were implemented about children’s involvement in legal proceedings and their special needs and rights as a vulnerable group. This shift is reflected in national legislations, however, there is still room for improvement, especially in the everyday practices within the interrogation rooms.

Monica Kim. The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History.

M<scp>onica</scp> K<scp>im</scp>. <i>The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History</i>.

Review: The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History, by Monica Kim

Review: <i>The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History</i>, by Monica Kim

Investigating and Presenting an Alibi Defense

The New Jersey Supreme Court has said that “few defenses have greater potential for creating reasonable doubt as to a defendant's guilt in the minds of the [jurors than an alibi].” But is alibi a powerful defense, or a risky gambit with a high likelihood of backfiring? In two-thirds of exoneration cases, the innocent defendant offered an alibi defense at trial which was rejected by the fact-finder. This article talks about alibi defenses from psychological research into the defendant's autobiographical memory and investigator tactics in the interrogation room, to alibi witnesses' memory and susceptibility to post-event information, to expected cross-examination and other courtroom issues.