Shuy provides specific advice in this book about how to conduct interrogations that will yield credible evidence. Other topics presented here include the analysis of how language is used and how constitutional rights are and are not protected.

Recent calls for justice reform have put a spotlight on how the police enforce the law in the United States. How a person's constitutional rights may be legally thwarted during police interrogation, however, has not been part of any meaningful discussion on police reform. This novel book examines the intersections of the law and policing discourse through the detailed analysis of a large corpus of United States federal court rulings, starting with Miranda v. Arizona (1966). It covers a wide range of topics, including the history of police interrogation in the United States, the role of federal law in handicapping a person's ability to invoke their right to counsel, and the invocation game of police interrogation that may lead a variety of suspects to change their discursive preferences. It highlights the need for American police interrogation reform, exploring the paths taken by other jurisdictions outside of the United States. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available on open access. Check our website, Cambridge Core, for details.

Forensic linguistics, or the study of language and the law, is a growing field of scholarly and public interest with an established research presence. The Discourse of Police Interviews aims to further the discussion by analyzing how police interviews are constructed and used to investigate and prosecute crimes. The first book to focus exclusively on the discourses of police interviewing, The Discourse of Police Interviews examines leading debates, approaches, and topics in contemporary police interview research. Among other topics, the book explores the sociolegal, psychological, and discursive framework of popular police interview techniques employed in the United States and the United Kingdom, such as PEACE and Reid, and the discursive practices of institutional representatives like police officers and interpreters that can influence the construction and quality of linguistic evidence. Together, the contributions situate the police interview as part of a complex, and multistage, criminal justice process. The book will be of interest to both scholars and practitioners in a variety of fields, such as linguistic anthropology, interpreting studies, criminology, law, and sociology.

"Read him his rights." We all recognize this line from cop dramas. But what happens afterward? In this book, Richard Leo sheds light on a little-known corner of our criminal justice system--the police interrogation. Incriminating statements are necessary to solve crimes, but suspects almost never have reason to provide them. Therefore, as Leo shows, crime units have developed sophisticated interrogation methods that rely on persuasion, manipulation, and deception to move a subject from denial to admission, serving to shore up the case against him. Ostensibly aimed at uncovering truth, the structure of interrogation requires that officers act as an arm of the prosecution. Skillful and fair interrogation allows authorities to capture criminals and deter future crime. But Leo draws on extensive research to argue that confessions are inherently suspect and that coercive interrogation has led to false confession and wrongful conviction. He looks at police evidence in the court, the nature and disappearance of the brutal "third degree," the reforms of the mid-twentieth century, and how police can persuade suspects to waive their Miranda rights. An important study of the criminal justice system, Police Interrogation and American Justice raises unsettling questions. How should police be permitted to interrogate when society needs both crime control and due process? How can order be maintained yet justice served?

How did the United States, a nation known for protecting the “right to remain silent” become notorious for condoning and using controversial tactics like water boarding and extraordinary rendition to extract information? What forces determine the laws that define acceptable interrogation techniques and how do they shift so quickly from one extreme to another? In Confessions of Guilt, esteemed scholars George C. Thomas III and Richard A. Leo tell the story of how, over the centuries, the law of interrogation has moved from indifference about extreme force to concern over the slightest pressure, and back again. The history of interrogation in the Anglo-American world, they reveal, has been a swinging pendulum rather than a gradual continuum of violence. Exploring a realist explanation of this pattern, Thomas and Leo demonstrate that the law of interrogation and the process of its enforcement are both inherently unstable and highly dependent on the perceived levels of threat felt by a society. Laws react to fear, they argue, and none more so than those that govern the treatment of suspected criminals. From England of the late eighteenth century to America at the dawn of the twenty-first, Confessions of Guilt traces the disturbing yet fascinating history of interrogation practices, new and old, and the laws that govern them. Thomas and Leo expertly explain the social dynamics that underpin the continual transformation of interrogation law and practice and look critically forward to what their future might hold.

Police interviewing is a critical part of the justice process, and more attention is now being paid to training in interview techniques. This new study uses tools drawn from interactional sociolinguistics and conversation analysis for a detailed study of some police questioning of adult suspects, and work undertaken in the training of police in interviewing children - in which quite different approaches seem to be adopted. Critical discourse analytic techniques are used in interpreting the outcome and the implications for training are explored.

This collection breaks new ground in police communication research. It involves the first instance of the same dataset being analysed from different theoretical and methodological perspectives as well as providing original and detailed insights into both monolingual and bilingual UK police interviews and US police interrogations of suspects. The topics include the role of metacommunication and its appropriate vs. inappropriate use in evidence elicitation, assessment of mitigation vs. aggravation strategies in questioning, identification of right vs. wrong empathy and the importance of getting it right, effects on complexity in police speak on quantity and quality of information obtained, and the multiple challenges that affect interpreter-mediated exchanges in this highly sensitive communicative context. All levels of linguistic meaning are covered, words, constructions, sentences, discourse, and contextualised within psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic knowledge about inferencing, emotion, and social interaction. This holistic approach helps us explain where, when and why communicative conflicts arise in this sensitive context and propose concrete practical solutions to resolve them. This volume will be useful and relevant to both academics, students and researchers, and to professionals in the domains of language and the law. Originally published as special issue of Pragmatics and Society 10:1 (2019).

The book presents a discourse analysis of police interrogations involving U.S. Hispanic suspects accused of crimes. The study is unique in that it concentrates on interrogations involving suspects whose first language is not English and police officers who have a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish. It examines the pitfalls of using police officers as interpreters at custodial interrogations. Using an interactional sociolinguistic discourse analytical approach, the book offers a microlinguistic examination of interrogations involving persons accused of murder, child molestation, and kidnapping. Communication difficulties are shown to arise from suspects' limited proficiency in English and police officers' equally limited proficiency in Spanish, coupled with the unwillingness of these officers to remain in interpreter footing. The volume demonstrates how pidginization and asymmetrical communicative accommodation can emerge in such situations of highly unequal power relations. It also demonstrates how cultural factors such as acquiescence to interlocutors of greater authority and higher socioeconomic status can lead persons of certain Latin American backgrounds to engage in "gratuitous concurrence", answering "yes" to police questions even when it is clear that that these yes-tokens are not truly affirmative responses to those questions. In addition, the book provides evidence of the kinds of abuse that can result from police interrogations that are not electronically recorded. Coerced Confessions reviews appellate cases involving police interpreters spanning a thirty-four-year period, and concludes that the Miranda rights are placed in jeopardy when a police officer is assigned the role of interpreter at a custodial interrogation.

Explores how suspect statements are elicited in police interrogations, written down and transformed into a document that is cited in court.