Forensic discourse analysis 247being questioned twice about the same events, once in closed session and
once before the jury.
His replies are not identical, although the differences in content are
usually insignificant; sometimes the verbal differences in his replies are
small, as in example (1), sometimes more marked as in (2) but the crucial
fact is that he is re-encoding his experience and not remembering his
previous encoding:
1 Power: One of them shouted ‘who is the sixth man?’ ...I said ‘what
sixth man?’
(TWT, p. 54)
Power: Somebody was shouting ‘Who was the sixth man, who was
the sixth man?’ ...I asked ‘what sixth man, what sixth man?’
(TBJ, p. 6)
2 Power: They told me there was a mob outside the house and my wife
and children would be lynched, only for the Police who were
inside ragging it, searching it.
(TWT, p. 49)
Power: He told me there was a mob outside my house and they were
ready to lynch my wife and children and the only thing that was
stopping them was because the Police were outside my house.
(TBJ, p. 4)
As these examples show, even when ‘saying the same thing’ Power verbalizes
in a different form. Therefore, what is striking, when we compare the Power
interview with his statement, two texts which also purport to be separate
recountings of the same events, is that there are so many utterances that are
word for word identical. I give just three examples below with extracts from
the interview first in each case:
3 and then he told Richard to give me one as well and then told Richard
to give me one as well
4 Hughie said ‘You’re going to take them it’s not only you that you’ve
got to worry about’.
Hughie said ‘You’re going to take them it’s not only you that you’ve
got to worry about’.
5 Hughie came back...said to me ‘You have to take them to the pub at the
side of the Rotunda.’
Hughie came back and said to me ‘You have to take them to the pub
at the side of the Rotunda.’
There are far too many of these identical formulations for the two texts to
be records of two separate tellings—no one, and certainly not Power, as we
saw from the trial data, has this degree of accurate verbal recall; thus, in so
far as these texts are identical, the only possible conclusion is that one of