Whose Voice Is It? Invented and Concealed Dialogue in Written Records of Verbal Evidence Produced by the Police

Abstract

One major type of evidence presented by the police at trial is their record of what the accused said. This evidence comes in two forms — records of interviews with suspects and records of statements made by suspects. Since the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE, 1984) which was introduced following a spate of claims that those accused of crimes were frequently ‘verballed’ (that is, verbal evidence was fabricated by police officers), the police in England have been required, whenever possible, to make a contemporaneous audio or video recording of verbal evidence. However, the three cases that I will discuss in this chapter predate PACE and come from a time when it was customary to record what was said in interviews laboriously in longhand. I was commissioned as an expert in all three cases when they were referred, successfully, to the Court of Appeal in the late 1990s.