Investigative interviews with suspects are complex interpersonal interactions that are focused on eliciting statement evidence to use within subsequent investigative and judicial processes. When conducting an investigative interview, criminal investigators face a series of decision points – involving potentially competing alternatives – which collectively determine how the interview will unfold. These decisions are also made under real-world constraints of limited time and knowledge. Interviewer decision-making, therefore, is both psychologically complex and practically consequential. In the present chapter we examine the role of interviewer decision-making across five dimensions of investigative interviewing: Why (is an interview conducted?), Who (will participate?), When and Where (will the interview occur?), and What (techniques will be used?). We use this structure to outline the current state of the literature on suspect interviewing best practices and how each decision point raises factual and ethical considerations for interviewers, interviewees, and the criminal justice system more broadly. We conclude by discussing potential future directions for research that can continue to inform effective decision-making in this area.

This chapter describes the legal landscape related to Miranda rights and waivers, as well as the relevant research literature regarding Miranda waiver decisions. The chapter identifies factors related to Miranda rights comprehension and waiver and emphasizes research addressing interrogations of youth and their abilities to provide a valid waiver. Research has identified that suspect-related factors, including age, IQ, and psychosocial maturity, as well as structural factors, such as the length, reading level, and content of the Miranda warnings, are related to Miranda comprehension and waiver decisions. The chapter also discusses the legal standard for judicial decisions related to the admissibility of confessions following Miranda waivers, as well as the factors that judges typically consider when making such decisions. Because research demonstrates that many suspects struggle when making Miranda waiver decisions, we conclude by making policy recommendations and identifying areas in which future research is needed.

In Chapter 4, the second vantage point of the book is introduced, that of the German citizen. It describes a record of how average men and women, from different backgrounds and living in different occupied territories, experienced the campaign to eradicate Nazism; how it impacted their daily lives and what they felt about it. Journal entries, private letters, newspapers, memoirs, and interviews chronicle much of the everyday denazification experience. An examination of on-the-ground activities reveals that the ideological cleanse was tethered to employment, and hence, political screening. If a shared denazification experience existed, it was the completion of Fragebögen. This chapter also shows that the consequences of denazification were more severe than what is often suggested. The form had the potential of permanently altering one’s material security, as well as professional and community status. Going through political screening was emotionally exhausting. This chapter includes a detailed case study of denazification experiences in Hersfeld (Hesse), a seemingly typical German district in the US occupation zone.

Chapter 3, “Pawiak Prison,” places a spotlight on the main institution used to control the intelligentsia and their behavior: Pawiak prison. Nearly 100,000 “political criminals” – resisting elites, or those suspected of resistance – were held and tortured there between 1939 and 1944. The Warsaw Gestapo, working for Hans Frank’s General Government administration, utilized the former tsarist prison as a holding facility for Poles suspected of resistance to the occupation. It became symbolic of Nazi terror and hostility to the Polish national project, despite being confined behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto from fall 1940 on. The experience of confinement, mistreatment, and interrogation within the prison galvanized opposition projects for those who survived the experience. Nazi paranoia about potential Polish resistance kept Pawiak full and constant overcrowding demanded solutions: the mass execution of many prisoners, prisoner transfer to concentration camps in Nazi Germany, and the opening of a new concentration camp at Auschwitz to the southwest as an overflow facility. This chapter argues that Pawiak was both symbol and microcosm of how Warsaw’s German civilian and police administration attempted to control the Polish intelligentsia and its potential resisters after the killing campaigns concluded.

The image of Gestapo officers relying on threats and violence is a myth. Informants were for investigating opinionmakers and torture was for networks of organized resistance. Routine procedure was different with lone critics. The Gestapo knew that denouncers could abuse the system. The return to formal prosecution also demanded proof of both an offence and subversive motive. An “impeccable conviction” required corroborating witnesses to establish subversive attitudes and either confirm a single public offence or a broader pattern. As a result, the Gestapo used conversational techniques to gauge the reliability of witnesses and suspects as officers gathered information from their social circle. Behaviour during questioning, discrepancies, connections between witnesses, and personal quarrels were all evaluated. Political background, severity of the statement, and publicness of an offence dictated how widely the net was cast. However, laying out evidence and offering clemency ultimately secured far more confessions than violence. The result was a two-track system of routine police work according to the demands of formal justice subject to cancellation under specific criteria.

Legal assessments of whether applicants qualify for political asylum in a country of refuge rely primarily on the applicants’ narratives and on their answers to questions posed by immigration officials during a face-to-face hearing. It is incumbent upon the applicants to attempt to persuade the officials of their credibility and of the merits of their case. In their assessments, the officials take into account the applicant’s demeanor, ability to recount a coherent narrative, and other often unarticulated measures of credibility. Lacking other evidence, or in the face of disputed identity documents, assessments of discourse are central to political asylum decisions. This chapter reviews what is now substantial research on the role of discourse in political asylum hearings and decisions. It considers how mistranslation and the failure to determine an applicant’s dialect have resulted in significant mistakes. It reviews the scholarship on demeanor and reported speech acts (e.g. bribery and threats). Our primary focus is on the dimensions of narrative in the political asylum process. We begin with the largest issues posed by the narration of trauma; the difficulties faced by people who have suffered atrocities are sometimes so beyond comprehension that they escape memory and narrative. In a close examination of narrative form and structure, we discuss how narrative fails in the asylum process, for example in misplaced orienting details, in the use of repetition, in attention to what the officials regard as extraneous information, in what is omitted (especially during accounts of rape) or in accounts that appear to be memorized or that contain stock elements that have become too familiar to the officials. Our discussion of narrative attends to the ways in which discourses are evaluated as too familiar or too strange. Finally, we consider the significant roles played by discourse analysts in the political asylum process.