Review: Effective Interviewing and Interrogation Techniques, Truth, Error, and Criminal Law—An Essay in Legal Epistemology
| Author | Andrew Roberts,H. L. Ho |
| DOI | 10.1350/ijep.2007.11.4.352 |
| Published date | 01 October 2007 |
| Date | 01 October 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Nathan Gordon and William Fleischer
EFFECTIVE INTERVIEWING AND INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES, 2nd
edn
Academic Press (2006), 291 pp, hb £44
This is an intensely practical book which is unlikely to appeal to an academic
readership. It is written in an accessible style and will probably be well received by
those whose stock-in-trade forms the subject-matter of the book. The preface
provides an indication of the authors’ general orientation, their starting point
being a Hobbesian view that ‘non-socialized humans, when left to their own
instinctual devices, will take whatever they can, from whomever or wherever they
can, while protecting their own territories and families (clans) from aggressors’
(p. xi).
Though the substantive text amounts to fewer than 250 pages the book has 17
chapters. Coverage of the various subjects is rather uneven with the more
substantial chapters being relatively short in length. The book may have benefited
from a précis of its structure or chapter content by way of introduction. In a short
preface the reader is informed only that the function of the book is to give investi-
gators a critical insight into human behaviour ‘which will help him to become a
better interviewer, a better interrogator and, most importantly, an expert
detector of truthful and deceptive behaviour’ (p. xii). Whether the authors achieve
what they set out to do is questionable; the overriding concern is the detection of
deception in encounters between investigator and suspect.
The central plank of the book is what the authors term the Forensic Assessment
Interview Technique, which integrates a number of separate techniques for evalu-
ating truthfulness of an interviewee’s statements by analysing both unconscious
physiological behaviour, and his or her verbal responses to an interviewer’s
questions. Various issues relating to this technique are set out in chapters 4 to 10.
Chapter 4 deals with preparation for interview in some detail, being prescriptive,
for example, as to size and layout of the interview room and the optimal distance
between interviewer and interviewee. Chapter 6 describes four categories of
questions which are used in the Forensic Assessment Interview Technique.
Chapters 7 and 8 relate respectively to unconscious verbal cues and non-verbal
behavioural traits (the latter illustrated using a series of photographs) which may
352 (2007) 11 E&P 352–356 E & P
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