Abstract
The opening editorial of Discourse & Communication identified police interrogation as a prime site for researching texts in detail and in context (Van Dijk, 2007). Susan Berk-Seligson’s work on police interviews in the USA speaks to this agenda, combining the microlinguistic with the macrosocial, drawing critical discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology into an interactional sociolinguistic stance. Through its analyses and Berk-Seligson’s wealth of experience it provides insights into both language and justice.
There are many ways in which processes and practices of police interviewing can deliver injustice. Systemic problems such as insufficient delivery of rights, and localized problems such as overly aggressive questioning, can disadvantage interviewees. Coerced Confessions takes in such problems, yet focuses on an overarching issue, invisible to many: the injustice potentially created within bilingual interviews, conducted without a proper interpreter. The book’s point of departure is the question, ‘Why do people confess to crimes that they have not committed?’, and Berk-Seligson responds that police coercion, potentially asserted particularly powerfully in bilingual police interviews, is key (p. 1). Accordingly, she examines false confessions resulting from intercultural miscommunication as sociopragmatic failure. As noted in her Acknowledgements, several chapters appeared previously in edited collections or journals, yet they feel like a coherent whole here. The book’s macro-structure raises questions about false confessions in bilingual interviews, considers their extent and presents illustrative case studies before considering implications.
Berk-Seligson’s first chapter begins by considering reasons for, statistics on and examples of false confessions. She isolates interrogation features which contribute to ‘police induced false confessions’, yet notes insufficient prior work on specifically sociolinguistic, interactional influences. This provides her point of departure. Finally, she compares federal government expectations about interpreters in police operations to the reality of ad hoc interpreting by anyone, including children, victims’ relatives and janitors – or no interpreter at all.
Chapter 2 addresses questions raised in its predecessor by reviewing USA appeals involving Spanish–English interpreting during last century’s closing 34 years. Berk-Seligson opens by contrasting relatively formalized interpreter usage in courtrooms with the comparative free-for-all of policing. Her discussion is motivated by distinguishing different kinds of interpreters, different forms of authority for interpreters, along with degrees of impartiality following from each and, finally, the various roles available to interpreters, other than that intended. Using cases from California, Florida and New York (states with abundant Spanish-speaking residents), Berk-Seligson shows that police officers often become interpreters during investigations with serious negative results.
Chapters 3 and 4 both concern a limited-English-speaking teenage suspect accused of rape and murder. The focus of Chapter 3 is delivery of his Miranda Rights. The chapter begins with a thoughtful if inconclusive discussion of the relative merits of official wordings versus impromptu explanations of rights in custody, examination of relevant legal issues and discussion of the challenge of unambiguously taking up rights in interview. It then moves to the interview case study. Here Berk-Seligson shows how the interpreter, a police officer, failed to successfully fulfil the role of interpreter only, slipping, from the start, into an interviewer and, indeed, interrogator footing. She illustrates that the suspect asked to exercise his right to silence yet interrogation continued, and that the supposed interpreter used appeals to shared linguistic knowledge and even religious beliefs, to extract information. Interpretation was incomplete with turns from both interrogator and suspect un-interpreted. Whilst the appeals court reversed the young man’s first-degree murder conviction on grounds of police misconduct, they apparently overlooked the significance of inadequate interpreting.
Chapter 4 takes a different view of the case above. Here, Berk-Seligson’s focus is the suspect’s contrasting linguistic responses to different charges. His response to a murder charge was to exert his right to silence, whilst he resisted a charge of attempted rape much more actively. Berk-Seligson attributes this resistance to the detainee’s sociocultural background resting on machismo which renders forced sex unacceptable, along with insufficient background knowledge about likely sentences and particular guilt about sexual attack. The review of literature attends to constructions of sexual crimes and blame in talk to alleged victims and perpetrators and in their responses. Data presented here reveal such police tactics as shifting responsibility to the victim and mitigating the crime’s seriousness. The chapter concentrates on contrasting the suspect’s relatively forthcoming explanation of the victim’s stabbing with his reluctance to agree to anything that implies rape, despite requests to enact the scene, euphemistic language and extremely faulty interpreting. The suspect uses non-agency and self- and allo-repetition to deny and resist accusations. He also appropriates euphemistic language, introduced by the officers, creatively. Berk-Seligson concludes by noting how much power interviewees can hold, even when linguistically disadvantaged.
Chapter 5 turns to a 20-year-old murder suspect. Here, the only evidence was a confession which Berk-Seligson claims, through her analysis, was unreliable. She begins by pointing out that during the interview, the suspect was asked leading questions and responded, predominantly, with yeah, produced 278 times. Berk-Seligson’s key questions here are: How was the confession obtained?; and Of what does the confession consist? She claims that the suspect’s gratuitous concurrence, his acquiescent, accommodative responses, only implied confession. The ‘confession’ occurred during the second in a series of interviews, the first of which became ‘invisible’, having been neither recorded nor mentioned at trial. Following a review of literature on linguistic behaviours which might maintain social harmony, Berk-Seligson invokes literature on the inferences and interactional pressures which such behaviours might initiate. She creates an interesting link, for example, to suggestibility which, as its name implies, sees interviewees conforming to interviewers’ suggestions, and she concludes that socio-cultural factors can hugely influence such behaviours. Berk-Seligson’s analytic work here highlights officers’ linguistic activities, which include coercive questioning, interrupting and meta-commenting. These combine with the interview being a ‘second telling’ and this potent mix produces an unreliable confession. She concludes that the suspect’s answers were ‘manipulated’ by the speech event and ultimately by the police (p. 141).
Chapter 6 concerns a man accused of child molestation interviewed by two police officers, one of whom was to interpret, despite having ‘virtually no proficiency in Spanish’, having only learned the language during one school year (p. 142). Berk-Seligson begins by illustrating that the USA’s changing demographics make such situations all too common. This chapter’s main themes are that police officers may lack necessary skills and knowledge in two languages, in interpreting practice and interpreting ethics. Berk-Seligson problematizes pidginization, asymmetrical accommodation and code switching to fill lexical gaps. She invokes literature on these topics and pursues them in the data. There, she finds ample evidence of the suspect working very hard to accommodate to the officers’ language with little or no reciprocal effort and, in a more interactional frame, barely any recognizable interpreting taking place. The chapter concludes that inadequate interpreting denies interviewees opportunities to understand accusations, thus allowing miscommunications with terrible consequences.
Chapter 7 provides Berk-Seligson with opportunities to present frankly horrifying facts, dispassionately. This chapter concerns a case in which interviews were not even audio- or video-recorded. The suspect and interviewer shared Spanish, but Mexican and Puerto Rican varieties respectively. Aside from police brutality and institutionalized misconduct which apparently surround the linguistic issues, evidence of inadequate Miranda delivery and likely incomprehension caused by dialectal differences abound. Without recorded data, Berk-Seligson presents a spirited analysis of what written data she has obtained – a statement written on the suspect’s behalf. She suggests that the statement’s uncharacteristic use of the third-person reference seems marked, but also evidences a police officer attempting to construct authority. She also notes affective consequences of reported speech. Drawing on a second accessible text, she also examines the interviewing officer’s courtroom testimony. Here, literature on stance shows him self-presenting as cooperative and professional. The seriousness of linguistic and extra-linguistic problems described in this chapter mean that it barely requires a conclusion, its upshots being obvious. However the conclusion provided indicates the risks of police interviewing which is isolated from the outside world.
The concluding chapter revisits the cases presented in Chapters 3–7, considering their upshots before reminding readers that the cases presented, and even the total cases where miscarriages of justice are identified on appeal, are surely not the only such incidents. A summary of policy implications arising from the book provides an appropriate close, along with calls for increased awareness of the role of interpreters in legal settings and the need for professionals to fill those roles.
Susan Berk-Seligson’s previous work on bilingualism in court set the bar high for other scholars in that area, with The Bilingual Courtroom (1990/2002) described as making ‘an important contribution, identifying subtle linguistic phenomena and going a long way toward showing the important realworld consequences they may have’ (Woolard, 1992: 229). Berk-Seligson’s readable, measured but purposeful prose pulls this off again in the policing area and we can only hope the book reaches influential readers. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of forensic linguistics and language and law, particularly those with an interest in interviewing. However, its overarching concern with power will render it a valuable volume for all with an interest in discourse and communication. I have already recommended the book to an interpreter who found it extremely insightful. Hopefully legal practitioners will also venture into its pages.