8.3: Introduction

The Fifth Amendment is also the source of a person’s right against self-incrimination (no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”). The debate over the limits of this right has given rise to immense literature. In broadest outline, the right against self-incrimination means that the prosecutor may not call a defendant to the witness stand during the trial and may not comment to the jury on the defendant’s failure to take the stand. Moreover, a defendant’s confession must be excluded from evidence if it was not voluntarily made (e.g., if the police beat the person into giving a confession). In Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court ruled that no confession is admissible if the police have not first advised a suspect of his constitutional rights, including the right to have a lawyer present to advise him during the questioning. Miranda v. Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966). These so-called Miranda warnings have prompted scores of follow-up cases that have made this branch of jurisprudence especially complex.

In this chapter, we will examine the interviewing, questioning, and interrogation of suspects as information gathering techniques police use to aid them in investigations. In modern-day policing, interviewing, questioning, and interrogation techniques are measured, objective, and ethical. They are aimed at the goal of discovering the truth; not just getting a confession to a crime. This is a contrast to earlier times of policing when techniques called the “third degree” sometimes involved threats, intimidation, coercion, and even physical violence. Fortunately, these “third-degree” techniques were identified in the United States by the Wickersham Commission in 1931, as being unlawful police practices that caused false confessions and miscarriages of justice, where suspects were sometimes wrongfully convicted and imprisoned (Head, 2010).

Emerging from this, police forces across North America, who were using the “third-degree” techniques to varying extents, started moving towards less oppressive and less aggressive methods of interrogating suspects (Gubrium, 2002).

While there has been a significant evolution to more objective and ethical practices, the courts still remain vigilant in assessing the way police interview, question, and interrogate suspects during criminal investigations. The courts expect the police to exercise high standards using practices that focus on the rights of the accused person and minimize any physical or mental anguish that might cause a false confession. In meeting these expectations, the challenges of suspect questioning and interrogation can be complex, and many police agencies have trained interrogators and polygraph operators who undertake the interrogation of suspects for major criminal cases. But not every investigation qualifies as a major case, and frontline police investigators are challenged to undertake the tasks of interviewing, questioning, and interrogating possible suspects daily. The challenge for police is that the questioning of a suspect and the subsequent confession can be compromised by flawed interviewing, questioning, or interrogation practices. Understanding the correct processes and the legal parameters can make the difference between having a suspect’s confession accepted as evidence by the court or not. With the above in mind, this chapter will focus on several salient issues, including:

• The progression from interviewing to questioning to interrogating, and how this progression relates to investigative practices
• The junctures that demonstrate the need to change from interviewing a witness to questioning a detained suspect to interrogating an arrested suspect
• The issues of physical and mental distress, and how to avoid the perception of officer-induced distress during an interrogation
• The seven elements to review to prepare an interrogation plan
• The five common reasons arrested suspects waive their right to silence and provide statements and confessions
• The interrogation strategies to initiate statements using the motivations within the five common reasons
• The three types of false confessor and strategies to deal with false confessions
• The additional rights of young offenders and practices required to meet the investigative obligations under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act
• Ancillary offense recognition