How does the criminal justice system in England and Wales accommodate witnesses or defendants who have difficulty with language? Only within the last twenty years has much thought been given to vulnerable people who struggle to understand and communicate, especially in unfamiliar settings. Now, the system does recruit help, and I’m delighted to invite Tina Pereira, trained in conversation analysis, to explain how she uses multimodality CA to help all parties cope with the demands of police interviews, enabling them to deliver ‘best evidence’.  

Reader of this blog will hardly need reminding that human communication in everyday contexts is typically multimodal, and that embodied conduct i.e. interactions that includes physical objects, gesture, as well as spoken language, typically impart meaning in a communicative encounter. So it may surprise some that those latter channels have, until recently, been largely underplayed in the criminal justice system, which, traditionally, privileges text and speech. Think of legal documents, police interviews and the to-and-fro of the courtroom.

I’m Jamie, an undergraduate studying Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Oxford. Having decided that being employed post-graduation would be ideal, I’d been looking around for internships that would help me explore the career paths I’m interested in, one of which is research. 

Some court cases rely on the interpretation of verbal exchanges – recorded conversations, interviews, police interrogations. The expert may be asked to say whether something is evidence of a bribe, a threat, a confession, and so on. Gary C. David PhD CCS is one of the very few conversation analysts who have been called on to help the court. His report makes for fascinating reading.

When is an interrogation and interview, or an interview an interrogation? How much does it matter how such encounters are characterized versus what they look like? How can we tell the difference between the two? These are questions that I had to address as I was asked to examine a police encounter with a person suspected of murder. My expert opinion could make a difference in whether evidence is admitted or excluded, and whether the suspect goes to trial or goes free.