ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the origins and development of key features of the criminal justice process as they evolved to shape its modern contours. It highlights some of the tensions that are intrinsic to a criminal process that has sought to incorporate within its formally adversarial structures values associated with crime control and rhetoric associated with due process. The chapter considers the place and role of the police in the criminal process having particular regard to the legal regulation of custodial interrogations. For the police, the practice of detaining and interrogating suspects before charge is a highly desirable administrative aid since through it confessions, guilty pleas and convictions are virtually assured. In protecting the confession as admissible and prima facie reliable specie of evidence, the law, as broadly conceived, has had recourse to a variety of legitimating forms. Law secures its legitimacy through a number of embedded and enduring claims: law is relatively autonomous.
