The Use of No Comment by Suspects in Police Interviews

Abstract

The right to remain silent is an important part of the caution rights and is provided as part of the police-suspect interview before the process of creating an evidential account begins. However, though suspects may respond ‘no comment’ to officers’ questioning to invoke their right to silence, the officer can continue asking questions regarding the alleged offence. This chapter aims to analyse examples where no comment is used by suspects and how officers respond to these verbalised silences and the absences which result in the account creation process. From a corpus of 22 interviews collected from one UK police constabulary, seven interviews were identified where suspects used the no comment response, either for part of the interview or for its entirety. The analysis uses tools from Conversation Analysis to show how officers will employ certain discursive strategies including challenges, making inferences and creating summaries, to either continue pursuing certain lines of enquiry or to switch topic to fulfil other institutional goals. The lack of response to certain questions is considered in terms of interview structure, and whether officers challenge or question these rights invoked by the suspect (Carter, Analysing police interviews: Laughter, confessions and the tape. London: Continuum, 2011). Expanding on previous research on no comment use during police interviews, (Stokoe, Edwards, & Edwards, “No comment” responses to questions in police investigative interviews. In S. Ehrlich, D. Eades, & J. Ainsworth (Eds.), Coercion and consent in the legal process: Linguistic and discursive perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) this chapter provides further insight into the metadiscourse of silence, considering the impact of silence and absence in a context where the exact wording of what is or is not said has potentially life changing consequences.

Appendices

Appendix 1

Table 12.1 Interview data

Appendix 2: Transcription Key

(.):

pauses of less than a second

(number):

pauses of over a second, provided within seconds, e.g. (3.2) is a pause of 3.2 seconds

[word]:

overlapping speech

-:

stuttering speech where a certain sound is repeated

?:

questioning intonation

↑:

rising intonation (not necessarily a questioning intonation)

↓:

falling intonation

(h):

exhalation with the number of ‘h’s indicating length of breath

word :

at a louder volume

°word°:

at a lower volume

(laughs):

laugh

<word>:

slow speech

>word<:

fast speech

=:

turns which run on with no pause between speakers