Evidence from Witnesses Flashcards
What is an Interrogation ?
- Accusatory
- Increases arousal and anxiety
What are Interrogation techniques: Inbau et al. (1986)?
- Direct confrontation
- Offered chance to shift blame by offering justifications for what happened
- Interupt denial
- Ignore shifts from blame
- Stay close
- Offer alternatives
- Give two chocies
- Get suspect to admit guilt in front of witness
- Get them to sign confession to avoid retraction
What are the dangers of using interrogation ?
- Unethical
- Miss important details from the crime (confirmation bias)
- Induces falser confession
- Leading questions alter memory
- Too much attention paid on one suspect
- Innocent until proven guilty
What 4 Factors can induce a false confession ?
- Defendant- Age, low IQ
- Arrest
- Mental/physical state
- Interrogation- based, leading
What is the Cognitive Interview ?
- Based off work of Loftus
- Avoids leading witnesses
- Techniques to get at memory
What 2 Assumptions does the Cognitive Interview rest on ?
- Memory is made up of an interconnected network. Need to be ways to access
- Accuracy through context dependancy. Time of context can be reinstated
What are the retrieval techniques used in a cognitive interview ?
- Report everything witness recalls
- Recall in different temporal order- helps prevent schema from distorting memory
- Mental reinstatement of context (5 senses)
- Recall from different perspective
What are the stages of the enhanced cognitive interview ?
- Greet and personalise the interview- establish relation ship
- Explain aims of interview
- Initiate a free report
- Compatible questioning
- Varied and extensive retrieval
- Investigatatively important questions
- Summary
- Closure
- Evaluation
What are the evaluations of CI and ECI ?
- Time consuming to use fully in investigation – often not all stages are used.
- When used properly offers established, thorough and effective method with a scientific basis in empirical research.
- It also includes a number of retrieval techniques that can be used separately when time is limited.
What did Memon and Higham investigate ?
- Reviewed research into the cognitive interview and made suggestions and recommendations
- Looked at 25 years of research
What was the criteria for articles to be included in Memon and Higham’s Study ?
- Studies must have conducted an experimental analysis of the CI in comparison to a control or other interview protocol.
- The research had to be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
What did Memon and Higman discover ?
- The cognitive reinstatement method seemed the most effective
- Recall from a different perspective and recall in different orders aren’t effective by themselves
- Research into this is sparse
- CI technique as a whole has an ‘synergising’ effect on recall.
- Research has been too simplistic in what constitutes memory
- Training needs to be effective and trainers need to be credible and respected
What did Memon and Higman suggest as a good comparison to CI ?
- The Guided Memory Interview- to test the effectiveness of cognitive reinstatement
- The Structured Interview- allow comparison with the cognitive components of the CI
What is the PEACE Technique ?
- Preparation and planning
- Engage and explain
- Account, clarification, challenge
- Closure
- Evaluate
How can preparation and planning be used for police interviews ?
- Plan interviews carefully plotting a timeline of what is already known, collating information about the interviewee and setting objectives for the interview.
- List facts to be verified and acknowledge practical issues such as vulnerability or underage witnesses, language barriers etc.
- Plans for interviews should be written down.
