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Introduction
Over 25 years ago, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) (PACE) introduced in England and Wales legislation governing, among other things, the interviewing of suspects. PACE had been the result of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure that arose in response to false confessions obtained from youths in a murder and arson case (Fisher 1977, cited in Milne and Bull 1999). PACE Code C (Home Office 2008, p. 38) consequently stated that ‘no interviewer may try to obtain answers or elicit a statement by the use of oppression’.
A significant development arising from PACE was the introduction in the mid-1980s of a statutory requirement to provide audio recordings of all interviews with persons suspected of being involved in a criminal offence (Home Office 2010). What really went on in the interview room was finally (possibly) open to wider scrutiny and something which a limited number of researchers were able to take advantage of. As Cherryman (1999) commented, ‘an interest in the topic of investigative interviewing had been sparked’ (p. 16) and research commenced relatively quickly after implementation of the new laws and procedures.
Despite the advances of PACE, oppressive interviewing and false confessions still persisted (e.g. ‘The Birmingham Six’) to an extent. This led to another Royal Commission in 1991 (on Criminal Justice) that was charged with examining the effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System in securing the convictions of the guilty and the acquittal of the innocent. A new code of practice published in the following year set out the new ‘Principles of Investigative Interviewing’ (Home Office 1992), which included that:
The role of the police is to obtain accurate information from suspects.
Interviews should be approached with an open mind.
Information obtained from the person who is being interviewed should always be tested against what the investigator already knows (this implying that suspects should not be told at the beginning about all of the relevant information).
The interviewing officer need not accept the first answer given.
Even when the suspect exercises the right to silence, the interviewer still has a right to ask questions in order to try and establish the truth (so long as the questions are relevant and not repetitive).
Williamson (1993) described this as the start of attempts...