The Detention and Interrogation of Suspects in Police Custody in France

Published date01 April 2004
DOI10.1177/1477370804041247
Date01 April 2004
Subject MatterArticles
The Detention and Interrogation of
Suspects in Police Custody in France
A Comparative Account
Jacqueline Hodgson
School of Law, University of Warwick, UK
ABSTRACT
Drawing upon my own empirical research, this article examines the regulation
of the detention and interrogation of suspects held in police custody in France
– the ways in which the rights and interests of the suspect are protected and the
reliability of evidence guaranteed. After considering the legal framework and the
impact of the European Convention on Human Rights, the article describes the
actual practices and roles of key legal personnel and the relationships between
them; the nature of judicial supervision; the role of the defence; and the conduct
of police interrogations. The article concludes that neither judicial supervision by
the public prosecutor as actually exercised nor the recently expanded rights of
the defence provide suff‌icient guarantees to safeguard either the interests of the
suspect or the reliability of evidence. Although the outcome of the investigation
is reviewed, the process is not. Despite the centrality of confession evidence in
practice and the obvious vulnerability of those detained, the police detention of
suspects continues to be regarded in procedural terms as a preliminary (and,
therefore, less important) investigation, with the result that the suspect is
afforded fewer safeguards when interrogated by the police than when ques-
tioned by a judge.
KEY WORDS
France / Police / Suspects / Custody / Interrogation.
Introduction
Drawing upon my own observational study of the investigation and
prosecution of crime in France, this article examines the legal framework
Volume 1 (2): 163–199: 1477-3708
DOI: 10.1177/1477370804041247
Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA, and New Delhi
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ARTICLES
governing the detention and questioning of those held in garde `a vue
(GAV).1In particular, it evaluates the ways in which, in law and in practice,
the rights and interests of suspects are protected, and the reliability of
confession evidence guaranteed.
The approach is threefold. First, after an account of the research
methodology, the article examines the role of judicial supervision and the
development of additional safeguards such as custodial legal advice, con-
trasting these with the different model of legal regulation adopted in
England and Wales. French criminal procedure is increasingly inf‌luenced by
the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), but there are diff‌icul-
ties in accommodating Convention guarantees (which are understood in
largely adversarial terms) within the existing (largely inquisitorial) frame-
work of judicial supervision; these diff‌iculties are discussed.
Secondly, the article goes on to examine how the central mechanism
regulating the detention period – judicial supervision of the GAV by the
procureur2– is understood and played out in practice. A number of factors
that shape the nature of this supervision are identif‌ied: tensions and
contradictions within the relationship between the procureur and police;
constraints of resources; and an ideology that envisages supervision as
bureaucratic and having crime control objectives.
Thirdly and f‌inally, police conduct in the course of detaining and
interrogating suspects at the GAV stage of the process is examined: the
methods by which evidence may be obtained, for example by use of threats
and promises; the reliability of the written records that form the centrepiece
of the case; and the impact that legal safeguards such as judicial supervision
or legal advice to suspects are found to have upon practice.
The article concludes that, although important changes have been
made in the attempt to regulate the GAV and to advance the due process
protections of those held in police custody, there remains insuff‌icient
concern with the process by which evidence is obtained and constructed.
Judicial supervision is the primary means of protecting the suspect’s rights,
but the way in which it is understood and effected in practice centres upon
the appearance, rather than the substance, of procedural conformity as
evidenced in the case dossier. It is unable to go beyond the written accounts
of evidence presented by the police. The limited role afforded the defence
lawyer is similarly constrained in its impact upon the process of investiga-
1The period of police detention of the suspect.
2The public prosecutor, who, as a magistrat, also enjoys judicial status. The trial judge and
juge d’instruction are also magistrats.
164 European Journal of Criminology
tion and interrogation. However, it would seem that a reappraisal of the
signif‌icance of the GAV within French criminal procedure is a necessary
precondition to any substantive change in this form of regulation. The
central investigative importance of the detention and interrogation of
suspects needs to be acknowledged and in particular the decisive inf‌luence,
which confession evidence obtained at the GAV stage has upon the
outcome of the case. This would open the way to more effective supervision
and defence rights, providing a more meaningful guarantee of both the
protection of the suspect and the reliability of evidence.
Methodology
Much of the analysis in this article draws upon the results of my own
empirical study of the investigation and prosecution of crime in France.
The approach taken towards data collection was similar to that used in
my earlier projects examining the work of criminal defence lawyers
(McConville and Hodgson 1993; McConville et al. 1994) and could be
broadly described as ethnographic (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995),
relying heavily on the use of direct observation.3Essential to the research
aims was an understanding of the positions adopted by different actors in
these organizational environments, and the research was designed to
discover the kinds of meanings they attached to their behaviour (see
discussion in Hodgson 2002b). This approach, which conforms broadly to
a Weberian model of social research, yields a large amount of rich, in-depth
data (Silverman 1985). However, there is a possibility that such data could
be untypical, and for this reason a range of other methods were used in the
research (principally interviews and questionnaires) to ensure that data
were reliable (Bryman 1988, 2001). In addition, the diverse composition of
the research team ensured that a range of different positions were always
considered and incorporated into the data interpretation.
Most of the data were collected through direct observation, followed
up by lengthy semi-structured interviews and then, f‌inally, questionnaires.
Although more time consuming than other methods, direct observation
was selected because it is better suited to the study of complex processes –
in this instance, the interaction of a range of legal actors involved in the
3I prefer this term to the more commonly used ‘participant observation’ because it more
accurately describes the role of the observer, who remains a researcher rather than a
participant in the sense of contributing to the goals of the organization under study.
Hodgson Suspects in police custody in France 165

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