University of Virginia Legal Working Paper Series
University of Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series
Interrogation Stories
Abstract
The essay poses questions about police interrogations that go beyond the decades-long furor over Miranda v. Arizona and even beyond the centuries-long controversy over the “voluntariness” standard for judging the admissibility of confessions in criminal cases. According to these debates, police interrogations have the potential to provide true answers to the historical questions of who-done-it, how, when, where, and why. In this project, I will argue that the police confessional is a space where the truth is produced by the interrogator’s strategic use of narratives that exploit popular ways of thinking about the gap between legal liability and moral culpability for criminal misconduct. The essay was motivated by the rhetorical strategies promoted by police interrogation experts for use in rape cases. Along the way, I shall have much to say about those particular techniques, as well as about interrogation tactics more generally. As is customary, my agenda is positive and normative. As for the positive, my plan is to describe what interrogation stories teach us about the character of police investigations as a device for recovering historical truth. Is the cop a species of archeologist, one who digs through layers of accumulated dirt to uncover and reconstruct a hidden crime? Interrogation stories suggest not. The interrogator is master narrator or improvisational playwright, one who is comfortable batting around potential plot lines with his leading actors before getting them to sign off on the final script. If playwright is the apt analogy, police interrogators do not merely find facts that are buried out there somewhere, just waiting for the alert detective to come along and excavate them. Rather, by using interrogation stories, interrogators actively shape the meaning of the facts by helping suspects to embed them in a coherent narrative that coincides with our ethical judgments about which acts are blameworthy and which are not. As for the normative, the essay will offer some speculations about the connections between police investigatory practices and the substantive mandates they ostensibly serve. Rape interrogations are a poignant context in which to explore these connections, as we see the police persuading perpetrators to confess by using the very same victim-blaming stories that the rape reform movement has aimed to expunge from the substantive prohibitions themselves.
Subject Area
Criminal Law and Procedure, Dispute Resolution, Human Rights Law, Law Enforcement and Corrections, Public Law and Legal Theory
Recommended Citation
Anne M. Coughlin,
"Interrogation Stories"
(June 2008).
University of Virginia Legal Working Paper Series.
University of Virginia Public Law and Legal Theory Working Paper Series.
Working Paper 88.
http://law.bepress.com/uvalwps/uva_publiclaw/art88
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