Interrogation Research Articles

The Production of “Indisputable” Confession Evidence in China

ABSTRACT Police interrogation, as a means of criminal investigation, is based on discursive interactions and serves the purpose of truth-seeking and information gathering. In China’s criminal justice system, many police officers believe that confessions are more persuasive than other forms of incriminating evidence and can help increase the success rate of criminal prosecutions. As such, when interviewing suspects, officers do not always seek information but rather aim to obtain confessions. Using transcripts from police interrogations as data, this research examines the accusatorial interrogation model in China. It focuses on language to explore the dynamics of power in police interrogations and police culture in China.

Argumentation in police-suspect interactions in Ibadan, Nigeria

In the Nigerian context, studies on police interrogation have acknowledged that investigating police officers (IPOs) wield power during police-suspect interactions (PSIs). We argue that power is not solely wielded by the IPOs during interrogation sessions; the suspect, who is often considered as a lesser participant during interrogation session, adopts argumentation to contest stances with IPOs. This study examines the rationale behind IPOs’ and suspects’ arguments in PSIs with a view to describing the implications of such arguments for power relations in PSIs. The study adopts insights from Frans H. van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst’s pragma-dialectal theory of argumentation (PTA). The study adopts a qualitative research design. Data for the study come from 12 interrogation sessions on cases of attempted murder, rape, felony and theft, tape-recorded at the Oyo State Criminal Investigation and Intelligence Department (SCIID), Ìyágankú, Ibadan. While IPOs argue by posing a positive self, developing themes around cases, discouraging denials and retaining suspects’ attention, suspects on the other hand argue to affirm positive selves and object justification, counter IPOs’ stances and create extraneous details to distract IPOs. The study posits that argument is a veritable discourse tool for negotiating power in PSIs.

Self-Realisation at the Risk of Tranquillity in a Carceral Social Environment: A Critique of ARABY by James Joyce

James Joyce’s collection of short stories under the title Dubliners is a landmark contribution to Irish literature that reveals the frustration of the Irish people of his time. While many of the short stories there deal with men and women, old and young, “Araby” specifically concentrates on a juvenile. The carceral social atmosphere prevailing in the environment limits his space to the nearest possibilities of pleasure and drives him in a direction determined by his libidinal energy. Unfortunately, a young woman much older than him becomes the centre of his interest and later the target of his love. Urged by his desire for the woman’s company, he makes a trip to an oriental bazaar amidst so much chaos to purchase a token of love for his dream sweetheart. His escapade from the beginning to the end of his trip is full of discouraging incidents, but he finds his way to the stalls. Ultimately, he gets alarmed and frightened before a police interrogation that goes on at a stall. The dormant carcerality engineered by a panopticon in the vicinity of his house shows its true nature at the bazaar. That puts an end to the project he has embarked on in his mission to win the young woman’s love. Covering the entire scenario, the paper treats the story as a report on juvenile delinquency in a carceral environment.

Deep face profiler (DeFaP): Towards explicit, non-restrained, non-invasive, facial and gaze comprehension

Eye tracking and head pose estimation (HPE) have previously lacked reliability, interpretability, and comprehensibility. For instance, many works rely on traditional computer vision methods, which may not perform well in dynamic and realistic environments. Recently, a widespread trend has emerged, leveraging deep learning for HPE specifically framed as a regression task; however, considering the real-time applications, the problem could be better formulated as classification (e.g., left, centre, right head pose and gaze) using a hybrid approach. For the first time, we present a complete facial profiling approach to extract micro and macro facial movement, gaze, and eye state features, which can be used for various applications related to comprehension analysis. The multi-model approach provides discrete human-understandable head pose estimations utilising deep transfer learning, a newly introduced method of head roll calculation, gaze estimation via iris detection, and eye state estimation (i.e., open or closed). Unlike existing works, this approach can automatically analyse the input image or video frame to produce human-understandable binary codes (e.g., eye open or close, looking left or right, etc.) for each facial component (aka face channels). The proposed approach is validated on multiple standard datasets, indicating outperformance compared to existing methods in several aspects, including reliability, generalisation, completeness, and interpretability. This work will significantly impact several diverse domains, including psychological and cognitive tasks with a broad scope of applications, such as in police interrogations and investigations, animal behaviour, and smart applications, including driver behaviour analysis, student attention measurement, and automated camera flashes.

Language ideologies and speaker categorization: a case study from the U.S. legal system

Abstract This study examines a judicial opinion from an appellate court in the District of Columbia, in the United States, using membership categorization analysis. The appeal concerned the absence of an interpreter during the police interrogation of a person suspected of having committed a crime, and whether this absence violated a local law about the provision of interpreters. Deciding this appeal required the court to determine whether the defendant had met a statutory definition of “communication-impaired” persons who are entitled to interpretation services. I argue that, in determining whether the defendant fit into this legal category, the court discursively constructed two linguistic categories that helped support its ultimate disposition of the appeal. These linguistic categories were hierarchically positioned, with English speakers as a default and non-English speakers as somehow deficient or unable to fully function in society. The court’s opinion also contemplated a binary choice of a person being able to communicate in English fully, or not at all, with the possibility that a person might be proficient in English for some purposes, but not others, often presented as a concession or ancillary point. Taken as a whole, the category construction in the opinion suggests an ideology of English monolingualism, which belies a reality of multilingualism, code-shifting, and mixed linguistic identities.

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.

Exploring the Stylistic Devices of the Police Interrogations

Exploring the Stylistic Devices of the Police Interrogations

Implicature and Question Types of Police Interrogation: An Analysis of Communication in a Theft Case

In the context of police questioning, effective communication was essential for getting reliable information, establishing reports, detecting deception, managing emotion and compliance with legal and ethical standards. This study analysed the implication and avoidance used in the communication and question types affected by witness responses in police interrogations on a theft case in Indonesia. The study aimed to find out how implication and avoidance were used in the conversation and how question type affected witness responses. The study employed a qualitative method, using investigation reports from Indonesia as the primary data source. The study found that four maxims were used in the interrogation conversation, namely the maxim of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner and there was some communication to lead avoidance. Avoidance was found in communication 7, 9, and 10. The police interrogator employed two types of questions: open-closed and closed-ended. However, the interrogator predominantly used closed-ended questions to obtain information from the witness. Overall, this study highlighted the importance of understanding implicatures and avoidance in communication and question types in police interrogations, particularly in cases of a criminal investigation. The findings of this study may assist in developing more effective interrogation techniques that uphold the witness's rights and facilitate the attainment of accurate information.

Reconsidering Miranda rights: Modeling strategic action during the invocation stage of a police interrogation

This paper develops a method to identify manipulation of custodial suspects who attempt to invoke the Miranda right to legal counsel during a custodial interrogation. The method, developed from a combination of framing theory and hypergame theory, first documents the point where custodial suspects’ preferences shift and second identifies the proximate cause of that shift using excerpts from legal cases. The method applies linguistic analysis within a hypergame framework to reveal rational behavior of custodial suspects who, despite owning an initial preference to invoke, waive their right to counsel without explicit pressure from police. The paper terms this shift in preferences “manipulation” adding the concept to hypergames and to the literature on noncooperative discursive exchanges.

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.

Multi-level graded facial emotion intensity recognition using MCANN for health care

Facial emotion recognition analysis is widely used in various social fields, including Law Enforcement for police interrogation, virtual assistants, hospitals for understanding patients’ expressions, etc. In the field of medical treatment such as psychologically affected patients, patients undergoing difficult surgeries, etc require emotional recognition in real-time. The current emotional analysis employs interest points as landmarks in facial images affected by a few emotions Many researchers have proposed 7 different types of emotions (amusement, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness). In our work, we propose a deep learning-based multi-level graded facial emotions of 21 different types with our proposed facial emotional feature extraction technique called as Deep Facial Action Extraction Units (DFAEU). Then using our Multi-Class Artificial Neural Network (MCANN) architecture the model is trained to classify different emotions. The proposed method makes use of VGG-16 for the analysis of emotion grades. The performance of our model is evaluated using two algorithms Sparse Batch Normalization CNN (SBN-CNN) and CNN with Attention mechanism (ACNN) along with datasets Facial Emotion Recognition Challenge (FERC-2013). Our model outperforms 86.34 percent and 98.6 percent precision.

Remaining silent during interrogation

In many Western jurisdictions, criminal suspects undergoing police interrogations have the right to remain silent. In this experiment, we examined the effects of remaining silent during police questioning on laypersons’ perceptions of a suspect. Participants (N = 126) read one of three mock-interview transcripts (i.e. admission, denial or silence) and indicated the extent to which they agreed or disagreed that a male suspect in a missing person case was guilty, cooperative, trustworthy and rational. Participants expressed stronger agreement that the suspect was guilty when he admitted guilt than when he denied involvement or remained silent. When the suspect remained silent, participants viewed the suspect as less cooperative than when the suspect denied or admitted guilt and as less rational than when the suspect denied committing the crime. Our findings provide some support for the notion that remaining silent during police questioning may be viewed unfavourably by external observers.

Implanting rich autobiographical false memories: Meta–analysis for forensic practice and judicial judgment making

ObjectiveThe implanting of rich autobiographical false memories is crucial for judicial decision–making, and the forensic evaluation of a testimony. In order to assess this issue, a meta–analytical review of the probability of implanting rich autobiographical false memories was performed. MethodA total of 30 primary studies analysing the probability of implanting rich autobiographical false memories were retrieved. Random–effects meta–analyses correcting the effect size for sampling error were performed. ResultsThe results revealed a significant, positive, generalizable (the lower limit for the 80% credibility value was d = 1.13), and more than large mean effect size (d = 1.43[1.33, 1.53]) for the implanting of false memory. The moderating effects of stimulus type showed that the effect of the probability of implanted false memory was significantly higher in experienced events (d = 2.03[1.63, 2.43]) than in false narratives (d = 1.35[1.23, 1.47]), and in doctored photographs (d = 1.29[1.06, 1.52]). A similar effect for memory implantation was observed in both the underage (d = 1.44[1.29, 1.59]), and in adults (d = 1.36[1.22, 1.50]). The moderator techniques for implanting false memories revealed a significantly lower probability of implanting false rich memory with non–directive instructions (d = 0.90[0.53, 1.27]) than with guided imagery (d = 1.45[1.32, 1.58]), or with pressure to answer (d = 1.56[1.17, 1.95]) instructions. The event emotional valence moderator exhibited the same effect for positive (d = 1.27[1.09, 1.45]) and negative valence events (d = 1.30[1.17, 1.43]). ConclusionsThe implications of the results for forensic testimony evaluation, police interrogations, and judicial cross–examination are discussed.

Evidence-based suspicion and the prior probability of guilt in police interrogations.

False confessions are prevalent in wrongful convictions, and much research has examined investigation factors and interrogation methods that can contribute to false confessions. However, not all these factors are under the control of the legal system, and improving the effectiveness of interrogation methods has a limited effect on evaluating the veracity of confessions. We suggest incorporating an important but often-neglected factor in interrogations: suspects' prior probability of guilt ("the prior," a Bayesian term meaning suspects' likelihood of being guilty before police conduct an interrogation). By connecting interrogation practices to probability concepts, we discuss a gap in the literature between questions traditionally answered by lab research and a distinct question faced by the legal system. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that police should increase priors by collecting additional evidence to satisfy an evidence-based suspicion of guilt before interrogating suspects. Implementing the evidence-based suspicion practice can help police reduce false confessions, reallocate investigation time and resources, and assist prosecutors in building strong cases for trial. Likewise, researchers should expand the empirical and legal questions they ask and incorporate priors into their interrogation experiments to improve the generalizability of findings to the criminal justice system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Lie Recognition with Multi-Modal Spatial–Temporal State Transition Patterns Based on Hybrid Convolutional Neural Network–Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory

Recognition of lying is a more complex cognitive process than truth-telling because of the presence of involuntary cognitive cues that are useful to lie recognition. Researchers have proposed different approaches in the literature to solve the problem of lie recognition from either handcrafted and/or automatic lie features during court trials and police interrogations. Unfortunately, due to the cognitive complexity and the lack of involuntary cues related to lying features, the performances of these approaches suffer and their generalization ability is limited. To improve performance, this study proposed state transition patterns based on hands, body motions, and eye blinking features from real-life court trial videos. Each video frame is represented according to a computed threshold value among neighboring pixels to extract spatial-temporal state transition patterns (STSTP) of the hand and face poses as involuntary cues using fully connected convolution neural network layers optimized with the weights of ResNet-152 learning. In addition, this study computed an eye aspect ratio model to obtain eye blinking features. These features were fused together as a single multi-modal STSTP feature model. The model was built using the enhanced calculated weight of bidirectional long short-term memory. The proposed approach was evaluated by comparing its performance with current state-of-the-art methods. It was found that the proposed approach improves the performance of detecting lies.

Code-switching as a marked socio-pragmatic discourse strategy in Nigerian police interrogation

Police-suspect interrogation is a strategically adversarial engagement thatinvolves tactical deployment of a variety of discourse strategies. This situationbecomes more complex in a multilingual context like Nigeria where the interlocutorshave the opportunity of expressing their communicative intents in a multiplicity ofcodes. This paper focuses on the pragmatic ways code-switching (CS) is deployedby interrogators and suspects as a socio-pragmatic discourse strategy to achievetheir institutional and personal goals. We will see that CS is used persuasively, asinterrogators and suspects negotiate from positions of power and inferiority, drawingon socio-cultural norms and expectations. 30 audio-recorded interrogations at theỌ̀̀yọ́and Oǹdó state commands of the Nigeria Police form the primary data. All theinterrogations were conducted primarily in Nigerian English and the subjects were18 years or above. CriticalDiscourse Analysis and CommunicationAccommodationTheory are adopted for analysis and discussion. Findings show that code-switchingis employed with different effects for different participants: for interrogators to warn,threaten, and perform verbally aggressive acts that attack suspects’ self-worth; forsuspects to plead for mercy and to blame-shift; and for both to boost credibilityand authority, and to highlight socio-cultural shared knowledge. Swearing andcursing also take place within CS with suspects using self- and other-cursing toindicate sincerity and to try to persuade interrogators to believe their claims andwith interrogators swearing to express their commitment and determination to followthrough with a course of action. CS is, therefore, seen as a marked and strategiccommunicative alignment that is motivated by institutional and personal goals andused for persuasive purposes

The interrogator-suspect dynamic in custodial interrogations for high-stakes crimes in Sweden: An application of the interrogation taxonomy framework.

This archival study was the first in Sweden, and the first outside of the US and the UK, to apply the (Kelly etal., Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 9, 165-178, 2013) taxonomy of interrogation methods framework to repeated police interrogations of adult suspects in high-stakes crimes. Audio/video recordings (N=19) were collected from the Swedish Police Authority of repeated interrogations of three suspects in three criminal cases. The interaction between interrogators and suspects were scored according to the taxonomy framework (Kelly etal., Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 9, 165-178, 2013; Kelly etal., Law and Human Behavior, 40, 295-309, 2016). First, there was an association between the use of different domains. Rapport and relationship building was moderately and negatively associated with confrontation/competition and presentation of evidence. Moreover, confrontation/competition was moderately and positively related to emotion provocation and presentation of evidence. Second, changes were observed during the interrogations. Presentation of evidence was lower in the beginning than in the middle block. Suspect cooperation was higher in the beginning than both the middle and end blocks. Third, an ordered logistic regression showed that rapport and relationship building were associated with increased suspect cooperation, and confrontation/competition and presentation of evidence were associated with decreased cooperation. The study's results are mostly in line with other taxonomy studies on high-stakes crimes from the US and the UK. The findings are discussed in light of theoretical frameworks, empirical findings, and current police practice. We also highlight the need for further research.

Police-suspect interactions and confession rates are affected by suspects' alcohol and drug use status in low-stakes crime interrogations.

BackgroundLow-stakes crimes related to alcohol and/or drugs are common around the world, but research is lacking on police–suspect interactions of such crimes. A large proportion of these suspects are intoxicated during interrogations, and many may have substance use disorder, making them potentially vulnerable to interrogative pressure.MethodsTo address this lack of knowledge, the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework (i.e., 60+ interrogation techniques classified into five domains) and a common classification of question types (appropriate vs. inappropriate) were applied in the coding of written police interrogations. Two archival studies, one pilot (Study 1, N = 39) and one main study (Study 2, N = 97) analyzed police interrogations with suspects of alcohol- and drug-related crimes in Sweden.ResultsFor both Study 1 and 2, suspects showed signs of alcohol and/or drug intoxication, hangover or withdrawal in more than 50% of all interrogations. In Study 2, additional coding indicated that suspects displayed signs of substance use disorder in 57% of the interrogations. The main results from both studies revealed a large number of direct questions asked by the police across all interrogations, and relatively little use of the strategic interrogation techniques from the taxonomy of interrogation methods framework. In fact, when it came to interrogation techniques, law enforcement used more confrontational techniques in their interactions with intoxicated suspects compared to sober suspects. Furthermore, suspects displaying signs of substance use disorder were significantly more cooperative and prone to confess than suspects without indicators of substance use disorder.ConclusionAs the first novel study on low-stakes crime interrogations related to alcohol and/or drugs, the present study provides useful information about current Swedish interrogation practices and areas for improvement. The study results indicate that suspects displaying signs of intoxication or substance use disorder may be more vulnerable during police interrogations. This may in turn have the potential to inform the development of new interrogation policies. Due to the novelty of this research, more studies are needed, both on a national and international level, to examine interrogations in low-stakes crimes further.

The Justice Gap and the Promise of Criminological Research. Russian Journal of Economics and Law

Objective: to summarize and study the law-application errors during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.Methods: dialectical approach to cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in historical development and functioning in the context of the totality of objective and subjective factors, which predetermined the following research methods: formal-logical and sociological.Results: the work describes in detail and considers four main causes of law-application errors occurring during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system. These include: false confessions, eyewitness misidentification, forensic error, and perjured jailhouse informant testimony. Hence, it is not accidental that the main task of empirical research of criminologists and other researchers in the past two decades has been a call for greater transparency in the evidence-gathering process and the development and implementation of best practices based on social science research. Developing conceptual knowledge is important not only for creating a more systematic, generalizable and respectable criminology of wrongful conviction, but also to better inform policy-makers’ understandings that people’s lives may be at stake, as well as trade-offs of wrongful convictions.Scientific novelty: the work considers the current problems in the American criminal justice system, that occur during preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction. Among them are the problems of police interrogations, false confessions and court errors, leading to wrongful convictions.Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions of the article can be used in scientific, pedagogical and law enforcement activities when considering the issues related to the minimization of errors occurring at the stages of preliminary interrogation, court investigation, and conviction in the American criminal justice system.The article was first published in English language by Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society and The Western Society of Criminology Hosting by Scholastica. For more information please contact:CCJLS@WesternCriminology.org.For original publication: Leo, R. A. (2014). The Justice Gap and the Promise of Criminological Research, Criminology, Criminal Justice, Law & Society, 15 (3), 1–37.Publication URL: https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/article/419-the-justice-gap-and-the-promise-of-criminological-research

Social Injustice

Social Injustice