Advances in Spoken Discourse Analysis

Forensic discourse analysis 243

the request to caption:

You now have the opportunity of reading over these questions and answers

and if you agree with them sign them as correct.

and any response to this request:

I’ll initial the mistakes, but I won’t sign them.

or

Its not that they’re not right, you’ve been fair, but I’m not signing

anything.

The text should be an accurate record, that is in the words used by the
participants, although it need not be totally verbatim—thus, false starts and
repetitions are ignored and, if a question has to be repeated or reformulated,
this too need not be recorded.
Records of statements, by contrast, must be verbatim—they must include
all and only the words used, in the sequence in which they were produced,
and there must be no questioning by the police officers during the statement-
taking; in other words, a dictated statement should be an unprompted monologue.
This system of taking evidence, with one party in total control of the
production, safekeeping and subsequent delivery to Court of the textual
record, is obviously open to abuse. Sadly for the discourse analyst, but
happily for those who have needed to employ him, forensic discourse analysis
is likely to have a comparatively short life. So much evidence has come to
light in the past three years of police ‘verballing’, that is police fabrication
of (parts of) interviews and statements, that most police forces are rapidly
adopting as standard practice the tape-recording and in some cases the
videotaping of interviews.

THE BRIEF

In essence, what the forensic discourse analyst is asked to do, almost invariably
by the defence, is to take one or more interview records or statements and
comment on their likely authenticity. In other words, the accused, or in
many cases the already convicted offender, claims that police officers have
fabricated a part or the whole of an interview or statement and is looking
for linguistic evidence of this fabrication.
What the defence hopes is that the discourse analyst will be able to
demonstrate that some or all of the content of the interview is untrue. Thus,
the first task of the analyst is to point out that discourse analysis can say
nothing at all about the truth of what is said in the disputed text, but can
sometimes comment usefully on the truth of diverging claims made by both
sides afterwards about the text. In most cases, in demonstrating the inaccuracy,
unreliability or impossibility of a claim made about a text, the analyst is
able to discredit the text itself as evidence.