Table of Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter 1 Introduction: language and institutional power 1
1 Coerced confessions and wrongful convictions 3
2 Explanations for wrongful convictions 4
3 Police-induced false confessions 8
4 Incipient bilingualism and coerced confessions: when the suspect has limited proficiency in the language of the law 10
5 Government response to the need for interpreting/translating services in the administration of justice 11
6 Organization of the book 13
Chapter 2 Interpreting for the police: issues in pre-trial phases of the judicial process 15
1 The interpreting continuum 16
2 The problem of conflict of interest 18
3 Interpreters for the police: a review of appellate cases 23
3.1 Police officers as interpreters and translators 24
3.2 The use of non-police personnel as ad hoc interpreters 31
3.2.1 Quality checking on ad hoc interpreters 34
4 Conclusions 36
Chapter 3 The Miranda warnings and linguistic coercion: the role of footing in the interrogation of a limited-English-speaking murder suspect 38
1 The Miranda Rights 39
2 Subversion of the Miranda rights of a limited-English speaker 46
3 The case: The People v. Alvarez 46
3.1 The linguistic achievement of coercion 48
3.1.1 Coercion by the police interpreter 50
3.1.2 Footing as co-interrogator 51
3.1.3 Failure to interpret utterances 60
4 Conclusions 62
Appendix 1 65
Chapter 4 Coercion and its limits: admitting to murder but resisting an accusation of attempted rape 71
1 The linguistic construction of sexual violence through interrogation 72
2 Background of the case 74
3 The management of an accusation and resistance to it 76
3.1 Questioning strategies and forms of resistance 79
3.2 Resistance to invitations to narrate, preference for fragmented answers 80
4 The linguistic construction of violence 84
4.1 Constructing attempted rape; strategies of denial 86
4.1.1 Repetition as denial and resistance 91
5 Exposing one's hand: a final police tactic 95
6 Conclusions 97
Chapter 5 Does every yeah mean 'yes' in a police interrogation" 101
1 Acquiescence: a cultural, linguistic, and psychological perspective 102
1.1 The psychological perspective on acquiescence, compliance, and suggestibility and their role in false confessions 108
2 The nature of the interrogations 110
2.1 Coerciveness and question type 111
2.2 Interrupting the narrative: the struggle for the floor 113
2.3 Monotonic intonation of questioning 118
2.4 Ambiguously worded, 'semantically overloaded' questions 119
2.5 Use of formal language 122
2.6 Admonitions to be truthful: expressions of doubt regarding the suspect's honesty 123
2.7 The use of metacommentary 127
2.8 Recycling topics 128
2.9 Rephrasing the suspect's answers 129
2.10 Repeated use of the word 'fair' 133
2.11 Putting words in the suspect's mouth: co-constructing the narrative 134
3 The pattern of the suspect's answers 135
4 Conclusion 141
Chapter 6 Pidginization and asymmetrical communicative accommodation in a child molestation case 142
1 When the police interpreter lacks proficiency in the detainee's language 144
2 Linguistic analysis of the interrogation 146
2.1 Pidginization, communicative accommodation, negotiation for meaning, and code-switching: all in the mix 147
2.1.1 Negotiation for meaning and communicative accommodation 148
2.1.2 Code-switching, code mixing, and lexical insertion 150
3 The interrogation: a sociolinguistic interactional analysis 151
3.1 Pidginized English, pidginized Spanish 153
3.2 The functions of code-switching, code-mixing, and lexical insertion 155
4 A coercive interrogation 158
Chapter 7 Confessing in the absence of recording: linguistic and extralinguistic evidence of coercion in a police interrogation 171
1 The absent tapes: the need for recording interrogations 172
2 Background of the case 175
3 Unreliability of the confession 177
3.1 Physical and psychological abuse: intimidation and excessive force 178
3.2 The sociolinguistic situation 179
3.3 Defective translation of the Miranda rights 180
3.4 The likelihood of comprehension difficulties 183
3.5 Linguistic analysis of the confession statements 184
3.5.1 The role of reported speech 186
3.5.2 Rivera's statement: a vehicle for the deniability of police misconduct 188
4 Stance-taking in the examination and cross-examination of Detective Jimenez 190
5 Conclusion 198
5.1 Steps that could have been taken to increase the likelihood of a reliable confession 199
Appendix 2 201
Chapter 8 Conclusions 211
1 The tip of the iceberg 214
2 Policy implications of this research 215
Notes 218
References 225
Cases cited 248
Name index 250
Subject index 253