Abstract
Written documents provide the interdiscursive infrastructure of the legal order in both inquisitorial and adversarial systems. They possess a downstream orientation to court proceedings where adjudication outcomes such as guilt or innocence hinge on the content of written reports from previous institutional contexts and genres. But how are such written documents assembled or co-constructed by institutional actors in pursuit of relevant bureaucratic goals? Using audio-recordings and transcriptions of police interrogations and audio-video tapes of Dutch trials, Martha Komter’s new book examines how the suspect’s statement circulates from the police interrogation to the written report and case file and finally to the trial. She examines how interrogation talk is channeled into a legally relevant and authoritative document, a document produced with an evidential eye toward its future use in the trial. Rather than start off with a priori assumptions about police deception to elicit false confessions etc. (the orthodox approach to scholarship in the field), she uses an ethnomethodological approach (with a dose of Goffman and splash of Conversation Analysis) to uncover the taken-for-granted methods of entextualization (decontextualizations and recontextualizations of interrogation talk), and how these seen but unnoticed processes transform the suspect’s statement to fit legal evidential relevancies.
After an overview of the Dutch legal system (an inquisitorial system) and methodology employed, chapter 2 analyzes the police interview stage of legal process: the “duo” and “solo” coordination of talk and typing in the police interrogation, the former consisting of one officer interrogating the suspect while the other does the typing, the later consisting of one officer who simultaneously interrogates and types. In both cases, officers organize their questioning of the suspect around, first, truth finding or attempting to nail down the relevant facts from the suspect and, second, statement-taking or coordinating talk and typing and selecting what items to record in the typed text. That is, what gets recorded looks “downstream” to the trial phase of the case and the necessary evidence for building a solid case against the suspect. What is most interesting in these question-answer-typing sequences is her richly detailed analysis of the coordination between talk and typing, such as the “differential pace of talking and typing” that is contingent on the “degree of adversarialness” of the interaction between the officer(s) and suspect (for example, suspension of typing may signal that the suspect’s contributions are inaccurate or incomplete). In the process, interrogation talk sets the stage for the transformation of that talk into an authoritative document.
In my view, chapter 3, the police report, is the most important chapter in the book. Interrogation talk is transformed into the police report or, put another way, talk is decontextualized from the interrogation and then selectively recontextualized in the report, where it becomes an authoritative and objective element in the case file, independent of its status as a co-constructed document. The police report erases the interactional contributions of the interrogating officers and fosters the impression that the suspect fully cooperated with the police to merely volunteer a monologue-like report. In reality, however, comparison of the interrogation with the police report obscures alterations and unreported items, such as the accusatory questioning of the officers and blame-mitigated components (such as denials) from the suspect. A major methodological “treat” for readers is this: Komter has developed a transcription technique that allows readers to compare the spoken word alongside the typed report. Like interviews more generally, the police interviewer’s contributions are erased or omitted from the report, making it appear authored solely by the suspect: foregrounding the suspect’s contributions while bleaching the interactional work of the police interrogators in producing it.
Chapter 4 investigates how the police report is embedded in the case file with other witness statements and employed as an evidential resource during the trial stage. The case file is crucial in the inquisitorial system because there are few if any witnesses; most of the evidential work is done through the case document. The judge mobilizes the case file to organize the trial, evidence, and questioning, lending the statement an authoritative aura of objectivity and truth. When looking at the statement, the judge attributes reported speech to the suspect when in reality such speech represents “reported reported” speech or speech reported by the police in their report of the suspect’s talk! That is, quoting from the police report fosters the impression that the quoted speech belongs to or is owned by the suspect rather than the police report of the suspect’s words. The suspect is the author of his reported talk rather than the officers.
Chapter 5 provides a case study of a suspect (Elmer) to illustrate the trajectory of the case from Elmer’s interrogation to the police report and finally to the trial and compares the police report with the original talk in the interrogation, show casing the major points from the prior chapters and how the police report transforms interrogation talk to capture the evidentially relevant particulars of the case. For example (p. 152), the police interrogator asks Elmer (a robbery case): Did you close that boy in with all of you, or stood around him? And Elmer responds: We stood in front of the supermarket. However, the police report significantly transforms Elmer’s statement from the interrogation:
In sum, Komter has produced an ultra-detailed and sophisticated analysis of context in motion, a rare masterpiece reminiscent of ethnomethodological classics from the golden era of institutional ethnography like Sudnow, Pollner, and Wieder. Her study is must reading for not only those in the ethnomethodological “community” but also forensic linguists interested in police interviews as well as linguistic anthropologists studying interdiscursivity, extextualization, and multimodality in institutional contexts.