Civil Law Assignment: Memorandum for Interview/Interrogation

Question

Task: Civil Law Assignment Task:
The chief of detectives is scheduled to present a lecture to the new class of detectives being held at the police academy, and he has asked you to prepare a memorandum for him to review. In your memorandum, you should include the following:

• How to plan for an interview or interrogation
-Your discussion of planning should distinguish between planning for an interview from planning for an interrogation, as well as planning for the interview that turns into an interrogation. -Are there aspects of your plan that depend on the subject matter If so, what are they If not, what are they
• Prior to conducting an interview or interrogation, what aspects should be anticipated

Answer

To: The Chief of Detectives
From: A Student
Date: 05th January 2022
Re: Planning for an interview or interrogation

The following memorandum provided in the civil law assignmentaims to provide insight into planning for an interview that would eventually turn to be an interrogation.

Planning the interview
At the initial stage of planning an interview, selecting the best possible format for the interview is essential. Notably, in this case, the interview is primarily aimed at gathering the required information for investigating a particular subject matter of the crime. The interview is aimed at collecting all types of objective facts. So, the questions that are to be asked in this interview should all be open-ended so that it would permit the witness or any other interviewee to provide enough evidence that would prove to be helpful in the later stage of the investigation(Thomas and Thomas, 2017).

The open-ended questions for the interview should be chosen very carefully in advance. The questions should be relevant to the interview's subject matter as in this case and should be consistent in nature. The interviewer should also be ready to answer any counter questions from the interviewee. It is equally essential to arrange for a suitable location so that the interviewee gets comfortable answering. The stage must be appropriately set so that the interview can start with very basic questions that are generalized in nature.

Gradually the questions will start getting varied as the interview advances.
Any variance or inconsistency in the answers should be immediately noticed and identified. Using such disparity of the answers, the interview can slowly but steadily shift towards a concrete interrogation. The subtle shift from an interview to interrogation will depend on the questions asked and how these questions are being answered. Identifying such gaps and utilizing them to the maximum extent for further investigation will be the chief objective for such an interview.The difference between interview and interrogation has to be clearly understood and followed in this case. As mentioned earlier, interviews are the first step to gathering preliminary information for the investigation. In contrast, the interrogation will be designed further, based on the facts and figures gathered from the interview(Interview vs. Interrogation: What’s the Difference and Which Can Private Investigators Use - NITA, 2022). Under interrogation, the detective always aims at extracting a confession from the prospective suspect about the crime conducted, which can then be further corroborated with shreds of evidence that has already been gathered and are rightly linked to the committed crime.

Subject matter
The subject matter, in this case, would be kidnapping as the aspects of planning an interview depends a lot on the subject matter of the crime that is being dealt with. It is a complex matter as the kidnapped person has to be traced and retracted unharmed. So, utmost caution has to be practiced while questioning. At the initial stage, it is not known to the detectives that who is the real culprit and as such the real culprit can mislead the detective to gain more time. A process of elimination has to be followed while interviewing the probable suspects(Gehl and Plecas, 2022).

Questions should be aimed at pointing out and identifying that who all can get a clean chit from this crime of kidnapping, the rest should be then interrogated. The interview should be used as a filtering mechanism to eliminate out all those who are having strong alibi of proving their innocence. The rest of the people who fail to provide reasonable alibi should then be subject to interrogation. This would leave us with a limited number of people or suspect to deal with and a such the task of solving the case would become much simpler.

Anticipation of Aspects
Prior to conducting an interview or interrogation, there are various aspects to be considered. The foremost aspect of interrogation is to distinguish it from interview. As interrogation is seen as the procedure of accusing an individual based on the interview results. The interview should prove that the individual had concealed the truth initially during the interview. The interview, on the other hand had been conducted mainly for the purpose of gathering information, to enhance the recollection capacity of the witnesses as well as to assess the honesty of the probable suspect or witness(Miller et al., 2018).

Another vital aspect of interrogation is to establish the credibility of any such investigation. So, at this part, the interrogation is primarily aimed at grilling the guilty suspect to the maximum extent. This further leads to another important evidence of minimizing resistance by which various techniques of interrogation are used to minimize the resistance level of the suspects towards achieving confession from the suspect(MANEA, 2021). This involves controlling and monitoring the conversation with the suspect in the most skilful manner so that the interrogator can rationalize the act of crime as a rational behaviour. These are some of the major aspects to be considered.

I hope this memorandum will prove to be useful in meeting your needs.

References
Gehl, R., & Plecas, D. (2022). Chapter 9: Interviewing, Questioning, and Interrogation.
Pressbooks.bccampus.ca. Retrieved 5 January 2022, from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/criminalinvestigation/chapter/chapter-9-interviewing-questioning-and-interrogation/.

Interview vs. Interrogation: What’s the Difference and Which Can Private Investigators Use - NITA. NITA. (2022). Retrieved 5 January 2022, from https://investigativeacademy.com/interview-vs-interrogation-whats-the-difference-and-which-can-private-investigators-use/.

MANEA, T. (2021). Lie detection during the interview and interrogation process: a psychosocial criminal approach. Civil law assignmentBalkan Social Science Review, 17, 41-54. https://doi.org/10.46763/bssr21170041m

Miller, J., Redlich, A., & Kelly, C. (2018). Accusatorial and information-gathering interview and interrogation methods: a multi-country comparison.

Psychology, Crime & Law, 24(9), 935-956. https://doi.org/10.1080/1068316x.2018.1467909
Thomas, K., & Thomas, K. (2017). Interrogation/ police interview: myth, realities and challenges. Misión Jurídica, 10(13), 423-429. https://doi.org/10.25058/1794600x.175