ABSTRACT
The police interview is the initial context in which suspects decide whether or not to exercise their right of silence. It is an encounter which takes place largely hidden from scrutiny, on police territory and on police terms (McConville et al. 1994:131; Holdaway 1983). As many defendants have found to their cost, what happens during the interview can effectively determine the outcome of a case. Having examined the arguments made for and against the right of silence in the first section of this book, the following part examines what happened in practice when the right was curtailed in England and Wales by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJPOA). The next three chapters explore the impact of the changes on the police interview, the solicitor-client relationship and the trial, respectively. Dramatic claims were made on both sides of the debate as to what would happen following the CJPOA, but there has been little subsequent investigation into what has actually occurred, other than one Home Office report (Bucke et al. 2000).1 After the wealth of criminal justice research in the early 1990s (including McConville et al. 1991, 1994; and the RCCJ research reports), no large-scale empirical studies were undertaken between Phillips and Brown (1998) and Kemp (2013). This means that little is known about the effects of the CJPOA on the working cultures of practitioners and the experiences of suspects. This is a problem for criminal justice scholarship more generally as much has changed since these studies were undertaken. The age of the studies means that their findings should be relied upon with caution for contemporary lessons. The data collected for this study offer a snapshot of what occurred in the gap between these studies. Other than where indicated, citations in this chapter are confined to research conducted in England and Wales due to the significant jurisdictional differences in police interrogation procedures. This second part of the book draws upon the findings of a case study that was conducted in one region of England between 1998 and 2001, shortly after the CJPOA came into effect, exploring the experiences and
views of a range of criminal justice actors in relation to the right of silence (see Methods for details).
