Garbutt2018

From emcawiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Garbutt2018
BibType INCOLLECTION
Key Garbutt2018
Author(s) Joanna Garbutt
Title The use of no comment by suspects in police interviews
Editor(s) Melani Schröter, Charlotte Taylor
Tag(s) EMCA, Silence, Police, Interview, Pursuits, Institutional discourse
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan
Year 2018
Language English
City Cham
Month
Journal
Volume
Number
Pages 329–357
URL Link
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-64580-3_12
ISBN
Organization
Institution
School
Type
Edition
Series
Howpublished
Book title Exploring Silence and Absence in Discourse: Empirical Approaches
Chapter

Download BibTex

Abstract

The right to remain silent is an important part of the caution rights and is provided as part of the police-suspect interview before the process of creating an evidential account begins. However, though suspects may respond ‘no comment’ to officers’ questioning to invoke their right to silence, the officer can continue asking questions regarding the alleged offence. This chapter aims to analyse examples where no comment is used by suspects and how officers respond to these verbalised silences and the absences which result in the account creation process. From a corpus of 22 interviews collected from one UK police constabulary, seven interviews were identified where suspects used the no comment response, either for part of the interview or for its entirety. The analysis uses tools from Conversation Analysis to show how officers will employ certain discursive strategies including challenges, making inferences and creating summaries, to either continue pursuing certain lines of enquiry or to switch topic to fulfil other institutional goals. The lack of response to certain questions is considered in terms of interview structure, and whether officers challenge or question these rights invoked by the suspect (Carter, Analysing police interviews: Laughter, confessions and the tape. London: Continuum, 2011). Expanding on previous research on no comment use during police interviews, (Stokoe, Edwards, & Edwards, “No comment” responses to questions in police investigative interviews. In S. Ehrlich, D. Eades, & J. Ainsworth (Eds.), Coercion and consent in the legal process: Linguistic and discursive perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) this chapter provides further insight into the metadiscourse of silence, considering the impact of silence and absence in a context where the exact wording of what is or is not said has potentially life changing consequences.

Notes