Mediated Reality Construction: Conclusions

Abstract

In adversarial legal systems, competing versions of an event are constructed through the legal process, from the police interview to the trial (Bennett & Feldman, 1981). Thus, the police interview is the first stage of the story-construction processes in a criminal case. The interviewing officer and suspect in each of the interviews examined in this book attempted to construct different versions of events, through interactional moves to steer the interview discourse in their respectively preferred directions. The main concern of this book has been the impact of interpreter mediation on the process in which these competing versions of events are constructed. This was explored through the analysis of interaction dynamics in interpreter-mediated interviews, on the premise that interactional features such as turn-taking, questioning and resistance strategies, repairs and silences are not only key elements of talk-in-interaction, but also parts of the ‘form’ aspect of legal narratives (Snedaker, 1991). The way in which the ‘form’ of the police interview was managed by the interpreter and the primary speakers affected the narratives as recorded evidence and the power relationship between the police interviewer and the suspect. This concluding chapter will synthesise the findings from the preceding chapters, by first summarising the characteristics of talk-in-interaction in interpreter-mediated police interviews, then discussing the impact of mediation on the construction of versions of events and the negotiation of power in police interviews.