Practical Psychology for Forensic Investigations and Prosecutions

Mark R. Kebbell, Graham M. Davies, Mark R. Kebbell, Graham M. Davies

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780470092149, 9780470092132
• eBook ISBN: 9781119161202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Forensische Psychologie

This book it is a comprehensive guide, aimed at professionals, that starts with the interview of the victim of the crime, moving through the interviewing of suspects, to the decision to prosecute and enhancing the quality of evidence presented in court. Other topics discussed include: false allegations, false confessions, offender profiling and victim support. Throughout, the theme of the book is that the chain of events leading to the successful investigation and prosecution of offences is only as strong as the weakest link, and should be considered as a coherent whole.

CHAPTER 1
Interviewing Victims of Crime, Including Children and People with Intellectual Disabilities

BECKY MILNE AND RAY BULL

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the importance within investigations of victims of crime and witnesses to crime and will emphasize that assisting victims/witnesses to provide as full an account as possible of “what happened” is a complex process for which interviewers need to be properly trained. Psychology needs to rise to the challenge of (i) translating what is known from laboratory and field research into this applied arena and (ii) developing new theories and techniques to the extent that current laboratory research on memory and communication provides insufficient guidance.

This chapter will first of all examine the role of witnesses and victims within the investigation process and then it will discuss the importance of the appropriate interviewing of witnesses and victims within the criminal justice system. This will lead to a discussion of the necessity of the accurate recording of information gleaned from such interviewing and we will try to answer the question: “To video or not to video?”. The chapter will then examine the interviewing of children and people with learning disabilities. The discussion will make recommendations for best practice.

INTERVIEWING VICTIMS OF CRIME

The main question that needs to be addressed is: “What is the main aim of an investigation?”. The answer to this question is a simple one, and is one likely to be true for investigations conducted in all countries irrespective of legislative and criminal justice system differences. The answer applies to all types of investigations, within many organizations. The main aim of an investigation is to answer two primary questions: (i) “What happened?” (if anything did happen) and (ii) “Who did it?” (see also the chapter in this book by Beaudry, Lindsay & Dupuis concerning identification procedures for identifying “who did it?”).

The next question that needs to be addressed is: “How do investigators seek to answer these two primary questions?”. Investigators have noted that in order to seek answers to these core investigatory aims they invariably gather material/information from a number of sources (Kebbell & Milne, 1998) and usually these sources of information are people: witnesses, victims, suspects, complainants, emergency services, experts or colleagues (e.g. the first officer at the crime scene). Information is therefore the currency of the criminal justice system. In order to gather such valuable information from these sources investigators need to communicate, and any communication with a purpose, is an interview. The aim of such interviews is to obtain the best quality and quantity of information, which can in turn be used to find out what has happened, who committed the crime and to feed this into the investigative process. Commonsense tells us that the more information that is obtained, which is of good quality, the more likely a solution will be found.

Why are witnesses to crime and victims of crime so important? How do they help within the investigative process? In the USA, Sanders (1986) asked police officers; “What is the central and most important feature of criminal investigations?”. The majority replied “witnesses”. A similar view applies in the UK where Kebbell and Milne (1998) asked 159 police officers for their perceptions of the utility of witnesses within investigations. It was found that witnesses/victims were perceived usually to provide the central leads in criminal investigations. Furthermore, investigators frequently have little (or no) other forensically relevant information to guide an investigation. Therefore, the primary source of information and evidence for the investigator is usually witnesses/victims. As a result, information gained from the interviewing of witnesses/victims often forms the cornerstone of an investigation (Milne & Bull, 1999; Milne & Shaw, 1999). (See also the chapter by Kebbell and Hurren in this book who discuss the critical role of evidence in suspects’ decisions to confess).

Information gleaned from witnesses/victims in the first instance governs the initial direction of the investigation, helping the investigators outline avenues of exploration and lines of enquiry to be pursued. As stated above, information obtained from witnesses/victims is pivotal in answering the two primary questions. First, “What happened?” (which in turn helps to outline the choice of offence to be charged and the points to prove the particular offence under investigation; in essence what crime is being investigated). Witness/victim information also helps answer the second question of “Who did it?” (if this question cannot be answered then there will not be a prosecution; witnesses/victims help in the selection of possible suspects). When a suspect is apprehended and charged with an offence, a good witness/victim interview can also be helpful in the planning and preparation stage that should take place prior to the interview of the suspect (Milne & Bull, 1999). In addition, a comprehensive account from a witness/victim, obtained in an appropriate manner, may help in the gaining of a confession from a suspect (Kebbell, Hurren & Mazarolle, 2005). This is because research has shown that strength of evidence is associated with suspects confessing within an interview (Gudjonsson, 2003).

However, obtaining the maximum quantity and quality of information from a witness is not an easy task. The information about the incident has to endure what we (Milne & Bull, 1999) have termed an obstacle course that involves imperfect eyewitness memory processes (Kebbell & Wagstaff, 1999), the difficulties associated with interviewing and the problems concerning the statement-taking process itself. Interviewers need to know about memory processes in order to be able to interview appropriately, as such knowledge will help interviewers to develop appropriate strategies to achieve maximum quantity of information from an interviewee without jeopardizing the quality of the information gained. This is because memory is fragile. It can easily be altered, changed and manipulated. It is, therefore, imperative for interviewers to learn how easily they can influence what interviewees tell them. The cognitive interview (and enhanced cognitive interview) was developed to do just this: help interviewees give a full and detailed account without decreasing the quality of the additional information obtained (see Fisher & Geiselman, 1992; Milne & Bull, 1999 for fuller accounts of the cognitive interview).

The initial interview and the accurate recording of that interview is crucial and can very often determine the success of the investigation. It would, therefore, be reasonable to assume that the interviewing of witnesses/victims and the resources needed to do this properly (e.g. time, money and facilities) would be a high priority. Unfortunately, research has shown that this is not usually the case and that the interviewing of witnesses/victims is often of a lower standard than the interviewing of suspects (Clarke & Milne, 2001; McLean, 1995). Indeed, police training courses around the globe tend to focus on the interviewing of suspects. Furthermore, in many countries interviews with witnesses/victims are still not tape/electronically recorded but merely written up as a statement.

There are three primary reasons why the electronic recording of interviews with witnesses/victims is important. The first concerns the investigative process itself. The best way to retain the information gained from witnesses to enable investigators to use this information to its full effect is to record it electronically. The second is from the witness/victim standpoint. The third concerns the presenting of the evidence within an ensuing court case, where the necessity of obtaining and maintaining an accurate record of the original account of an event from witnesses is crucial – “the bedrock of (the) adversarial process is the evidence of witnesses for the prosecution, not the confession of the accused” (Wolchover & Heaton-Armstrong, 1997a, p. 855). The decision of whether to electronically record interviews with witnesses/victims (or to merely take a written statement) is thus an extremely important decision.

We will examine the investigative reasons first. During an interview, what the interviewee communicates verbally and nonverbally has to be encoded by the interviewer. However, the many tasks required in a witness¹ interview put a lot of cognitive demands on the interviewer, especially so when there is no recording of the interview (e.g. the interviewer has to conduct an appropriate interview and also write down what the interviewee is saying). We all have only a limited amount of cognitive resources available at any one time (Navon & Gopher, 1979). As a result, the quality of the interview will suffer (Clarke & Milne, 2001) and there will be incomplete encoding of the available information (i.e. what the witness is reporting). In other words, not all the information mentioned by the interviewee will be encoded; some of it will never enter the interviewer’s memory at all. The information that does enter the interviewer’s memory has later to be recalled (for example, to produce a written statement or report). Thus, the information reported by the interviewee must travel through the memory processes of the interviewer. Research has found that even if a police report is written immediately after the interview, the report may contain only two-thirds of the relevant information reported by the interviewee (Koehnken, Thurer & Zoberbier, 1994). This would not be so bad if only irrelevant information is left out of the statement (presuming that the interviewer at that time in the investigation knows what information will be crucial to the case). Lamb, Orbach, Sternberg, Hershkowitz and Horowitz (2000) found that, even when investigators took notes within an interview, 25% of the forensically relevant details provided by child interviewees were not included (many of these details were considered to be central to the investigation). Lamb et al. (2000) concluded “interviewers cannot be expected to provide complete accounts of their interviews without electronic assistance” (p. 705).

It has also been well documented that even before an interview begins interviewers form judgements about the event in question (Shepherd & Milne, 1999). For police investigators, these primarily arise from the crime category to which the alleged offence belongs and what typically occurs in such offences (i.e. offence knowledge) (Mortimer & Shepherd, 1999). Investigators will, wittingly or unwittingly, utilize this information to guide the direction of the case (Ask & Granhag, 2005). These judgements also guide their attention, comprehensio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• Series Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1: Interviewing Victims of Crime, Including Children and People with Intellectual Disabilities
• CHAPTER 2: Procedural Recommendations to Increase the Reliability of Eyewitness Identifications
• CHAPTER 3: Investigating Criminal Cases of Delayed Reports of Sexual Abuse
• CHAPTER 4: Psychological Characteristics of Offenders
• CHAPTER 5: Detecting Deception
• CHAPTER 6: Improving the Interviewing of Suspected Offenders
• CHAPTER 7: Strategies for Preventing False Confessions and Their Consequences
• CHAPTER 8: Offender Profiling: Limits and Potential
• CHAPTER 9: Deciding to Prosecute
• CHAPTER 10: Preventing Withdrawal of Complaints and Psychological Support for Victims
• CHAPTER 11: Communicating Risk to the Court
• CHAPTER 12: Future Directions for Applying Psychology to Forensic Investigations and Prosecutions
• Index
• End User License Agreement