WDC403

Title: For the Record: Assessing force-level variation in the transcription of police-suspect interviews in England and Wales Abstract: Recordings of police-suspect interviews in England and Wales are rarely played in court, despite being a key evidence source. More often, interviews are presented in the form of a ROTI (Record of Taped Interview) transcript. However, research […]

Title: For the Record: A collaboration to improve evidential consistency in the production of police  investigative interview records Abstract: This paper will present the findings of a pilot project being undertaken as a collaboration between  academic researchers and an English police force, which applies linguistic research to the process of  producing written transcripts of investigative […]

Title: (Not) for the record: Doing implicatures in police reports of domestic violence Abstract: Conversational implicature (Grice 1975) is a pragmatic strategy used in discourse to carry meaning(s) not encoded explicitly in language. There are many reasons why explicitness is not the most appropriate route, for example, social politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987). Discourse participants […]

Title: Verbal cues to deception in autistic mock-suspects Abstract: Investigative interviews present significant social and cognitive challenges to autistic people. Autistic witnesses often provide less detailed and accurate information during interviews than typically developing (TD) comparisons. Autistic suspects may similarly struggle to provide such information, leaving them susceptible to appearing deceptive. However, there is currently […]

Title: Police officers' perceptions and experiences of promoting honesty in child witnesses Abstract: When interviewing vulnerable witnesses, such as children, investigative interviewers in England and Wales are advised to follow the Achieving Best Evidence (ABE) in Criminal Proceedings guidelines (MoJ, 2022). These guidelines recommend that practitioners engage in a truth-lies discussion with child witnesses at […]

Title: Vanity Fair Syndrome in Japan: A Conviction without a Criminal Abstract: It is known that sometimes investigators unintentionally let defendants confess that he/she is a criminal in cases that should have been treated as ‘accidents’ not ‘crimes’. This is one of the types of false confession leading to the miscarriage of justice. Collecting such kinds […]

Title: Beliefs, Confidence, and Attribution Bias regarding Deception Cues in Police Officers and Laypeople  Abstract: Police officers' beliefs regarding deception detection are often remote from the scientific consensus. These beliefs commonly rely on the nervousness hypothesis, stating that deceit involves observable behavioral indicators of stress. However, little is know about how these beliefs may vary […]

Title: The Influence of Culture on Witness Accounts: An Interdisciplinary Scoping Review Abstract: In an ever more globalized world, it is becoming more common for witnesses and those gathering evidence to be from different countries. Investigative interviewers and legal practitioners frequently report problems when questioning witnesses with different cultural backgrounds. We conducted a scoping review, […]

Title: The Way We All Remember: The Influence of Different Cultures on Eyewitness Memory and Investigative Interviewing Abstract:  Nowadays, more and more people report about their memories in cross-cultural contexts, such as asylum interviews and international criminal cases. That poses challenges, because there are differences in how people from different cultural backgrounds remember and talk […]