Coerced Confessions The Discourse of Bilingual Pol... - (PG 13 - 122)

Chapter 1
Introduction: language and institutional power
Every day, in police stations across the United States, people confess to crimes
that they have not committed. Confessing has serious repercussions for these
detainees: many are convicted, imprisoned, and even executed, based on those
confessions. Research has shown that confessions are the single most important
piece of evidence that will sway jurors to convict defendants. With the advent of
DNA evidence, however, there has been an increased awareness in recent years
that many innocent defendants have confessed falsely and consequently have
been wrongly convicted.
Why do people confess to crimes that they have not committed? One key
reason, research has increasingly shown, is police coercion. To make my case, I
analyze linguistic coercion in interrogations among U.S. Latinos, with a special
focus on the role that incipient bilingualism plays in this particular sociolinguis-
tic context.
The analytical framework that will be used to examine cases in which co-
erced confessions emerge is interactional sociolinguistics, with a specific focus
on talk in institutional settings. Specifically, the book examines the interaction
between police officers and persons suspected of having committed felonies,
in situations where the suspects have limited proficiency in the language of the
institution. The crimes studied here are: murder, child molestation, attempted
rape, and kidnapping. The larger sociolinguistic institutional context is the ad-
ministration of justice system of the U.S.A. The local context comprises police
stations in the cities in which these interrogations took place, and from an in-
teractional perspective, the interrogation of suspects by the police. The book
focuses on the interrogation of native Spanish-speakers having varying degrees
of proficiency in English, by persons having varying levels of proficiency in
Copyright © 2009. De Gruyter. All rights reserved.
Spanish. In essence, the book makes the case that institutional gatekeepers such
as the police, by systematically failing to involve professional interpreters in
the interrogation speech event, and by taking on an institutional role that should
be designated to such nonpartisan professionals, create a speech situation that
lends itself to coerced confessions. Out of this troubling stew emerge systematic
violations of due process, on which the entire system of justice eventually rests.
While others have looked at police interrogations, this book attempts to break
new ground. Research on false confessions and the exoneration of persons con-
victed of felonies punishable by death thus far has left unexplored the factor of
sociopragmatic failure related to intercultural communication problems. This
Berk-Seligson, S. (2009). <i>Coerced confessions : the discourse of bilingual police interrogations</i>. Retrieved from
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2 Introduction: language and institutional power
book examines coercion from an interactional sociolinguistic point of view,

taking into account the larger social context in which the local interaction is em-
bedded, namely, highly asymmetrical power relations between interlocutors, and
the simultaneous pressure on those in power to “rush to judgment” by resolving
their cases rapidly. Placed in this research context, the analysis draws insights
from critical interactional sociolinguistics. Following the lead of discourse ana-
lysts such as Fairclough (1995), Sarangi and Roberts (1999), Holmes and Stubbe
(2003), and scholars who have studied discourse in sociolegal settings (Conley
and O’Barr 1990, 1998; Cotterill 2002, 2003a; Drew and Heritage 1992; Ehrlich
2001; Matoesian 2001; Philips 1998), this book combines microlinguistic anal-
ysis with macrosocial understanding.
The research presented here attempts to add to the growing body of work in
critical discourse analysis, following in the footsteps of linguists such as Van
Dijk (1987, 1993), Mey (1985), and Wodak (1989, 1995), all of whom share
a perspective that focuses on “structural relationships of dominance, discrim-
ination, power and control as manifested in language” (Wodak 1995: 204). At
the same time, this research is consistent with the notions of ‘language ideol-
ogy’ embedded in the work of linguistic anthropologists such as Woolard and
Schieffelin (1994), Kroskrity, Schieffelin and Woolard (1992), Silverstein and
Urban 1996, Baumann and Briggs (1990), Gal (1989), Heller (1994), Conley
and O’Barr (1998), and Philipps (1998), all of whom see ideology as “socially
situated and articulated in everyday practices” (Blommaert and Culcaen 1997).
This book, which is qualitative in methodology and focuses on a series of case
studies for its analysis, demonstrates that dominance, power and control can be
achieved in interaction both by denying an interlocutor the ability to compre-
hend the speech of those who command the language of the institution in which
the discourse is situated and, in addition, by denying him or her the ability to
express him or herself fully in the interaction. In effect, not to provide commu-
nicative assistance to persons who are linguistically at a disadvantage is to put
oneself in a position of dominance, power and control over them.

Furthermore, if certain sorts of interlocutors (e.g., juveniles, the mentally
disabled or cognitively impaired) have been shown to be particularly vulnerable
to psychological pressure tactics when questioned by authorities such as the
police, then an additional social group should be considered to be vulnerable,
namely, persons whose proficiency in the language of the speech event and of the
institution as a whole is limited. Since limited language proficiency is in large
measure tied to immigrant status, in the context of U.S. administration of justice,
I argue that Limited-English Proficient (LEP) immigrants find themselves at a
distinct disadvantage in their encounters with U.S. judicial authorities. And in
the specific situation of police interrogations, short of being provided qualified,
Coerced confessions and wrongful convictions 3
professional interpreters, the LEP suspect will find him or herself in a position
of far greater vulnerability than will a native English-speaking adult who is not
cognitively impaired.
1. Coerced confessions and wrongful convictions

With the advent of DNA evidence in the U.S. justice system, every passing
day brings to light new revelations of people languishing in prison who have
been wrongfully convicted of crimes that they did not commit. Legal experts
such as Peter J. Neufeld and Barry C. Scheck of Yeshivah University’s Cardozo
Law School, who are directors of the New York City-based “Innocence Project,”
James S. Liebman, professor of law at Columbia University and head of a team
investigating wrongful convictions in capital punishment cases, and Lawrence
C. Marshall and Steven Drizin, professors of law and key figures in Northwestern
University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions in Chicago, have spearheaded the
movement to bring to light new evidence that would exonerate many of these
innocent people. Following their pioneering lead, others in the field of law have
established forty-one innocence commissions in thirty-one states, as of 2005
(Gross et al. 2005: 528).
A consequence of the work of these innocence commissions is the reversal of
numerous capital punishment convictions. Liebman, writing in 2002, reports that
thus far, “101 individuals sentenced to die during the current death-sentencing
era have subsequently been acquitted of the capital offense and released” (Lieb-
man 2002: 79). This empirical study of the judicial review outcomes of over
5,800 death verdicts coming out of thirty-four states that use the death penalty,
including 1,004 U.S. counties that have the death sentence, finds that for the
period 1973–1995, of the 4,500 verdicts that were reviewed on direct appeal,
41 percent had reversible flaws, and of the verdicts that were not reversed at this
stage of appeal, an additional 10 percent were reversed after being reviewed at

the next highest level of appeal, the state courts. Among those death verdicts that
were not overturned by the state courts 41 percent were overturned by federal
courts (Liebman 2002: 80). Liebman (2002: 81) summarizes the findings of his
research team with the following conclusion: “The upshot of this 23-year track
record is that, for any given 100 fully reviewed verdicts, an average of 47 were
reversed by the state courts, and 68 of the 100 were reversed by either the state
or federal courts.” These are striking findings.
Another study of wrongfully convicted prisoners on death row, Holmes
(2002), finds that of 6,200 persons under capital sentences by state and fed-
eral courts during the period 1970 to 1992, “more than 40 percent [2,510] were
found to have been illegally convicted or sentenced in their first trial” (Holmes
2002: 104), that is to say, whether they were guilty or innocent of the crime
with which they were charged, some “grievous legal defect in the process” led
to their conviction (Holmes 2002: 100). Of these 2,510 illegally convicted or
sentenced persons, 688 (or 27%) were permitted a retrial, and of those whose
retrial results were known at the time of Holmes’ study (a total of 243 persons),
58 (23.9%) were found legally innocent. Thus, a subset of illegal convictions
comprises cases of wrongful convictions, that is, they involve persons who are
actually innocent. And while these statistics reflect only cases of capital pun-
ishment, and overwhelmingly such cases deal with murder (98.3%), it can be
argued that wrongful conviction is widespread in cases involving less serious
offenses as well (Holmes 2002: 104).
As a result of findings such as these, together with the fact that in one state,
Illinois, with the re-institution of the death penalty in 1977, 12 men had been exe-
cuted, yet during the same period 13 men sentenced to death had been exonerated,
the governor of Illinois, George Ryan, in January 2000 declared a moratorium on
executions, the first such action in recent U.S. history (Marshall 2002: 83). With
the moratorium, he appointed a commission to study capital punishment. After
reading the recommendations of the commission, and suddenly aware of the de-
fects in Illinois’ criminal justice system, the governor commuted the sentences
of all of the 164 persons on death row in the state before leaving office in 2003.
2. Explanations for wrongful convictions
Why are persons wrongfully convicted? C. Ronald Huff, a professor of Crim-

inology, Law and Society, summarizes the most common causes of wrongful
convictions (Huff 2002: 93):
. . . eyewitness error; overzealous law enforcement officers and prosecutors who
engage in misconduct, including withholding evidence; false/coerced confessions

and suggestive interrogations [emphasis added]; perjury; misleading lineups;
ineffective assistance of counsel; inappropriate use of informants or “snitches”;
community pressure for a conviction; forensic science errors, incompetence, and
fraud; and the “ratification of error” (the tendency to “rubber stamp” decisions
made at lower levels as cases move up through the system).
Huff (2002: 93) notes that usually more than one factor is at play in producing
the error and that these factors interact with one another. Scheck, Neufeld and
Dwyer (2000: Appendix 2), analyzing the factors that led to the wrongful convic-
tions of sixty-two persons across the U.S., all of whom were exonerated by DNA
evidence, find that fifteen of them (or 22 percent) had confessed to the crimes
Explanations for wrongful convictions 5
for which they were convicted. Other factors that played a role in these wrongful
convictions, according to Scheck et al. (2000: Appendix 2) were, in order of fre-
quency: mistaken identity, serology evidence, police misconduct, prosecutorial
misconduct, defective or fraudulent science, microscopic hair comparison, bad
lawyering, false witness testimony, the statements of informants/snitches, other
forensic inclusions and the inclusion of DNA evidence.
Drizin and Leo (2004) add to this list the factors of multiple confessions in a
single case and police departments having a history of problematic interrogation
tactics. The Chicago police department is one such department. The second
largest police department in the country, it has been found by a team of University
of Chicago legal scholars (Futterman, Mather, and Miles, “The Chicago Police
Department’s Broken System”), to be the object of more complaints of brutality
per officer than the average for large departments in the country, and to be less
likely to investigate abuse allegations seriously than do other police departments
(1% rate of finding sufficient evidence of abuse versus 8% nationally) (Saulny
2007: A23). In the period between 1999 and 2004, 1,774 brutality complaints
per year were filed by citizens against the Chicago police (Saulny 2007: A23).
Complaints included the use of excessive force, conducting illegal searches,
making false arrests, and sexual abuse. The accusations of police abuse and
department neglect of such accusations were found to be most frequent in low-
income minority neighborhoods.
Since the phenomenon of false confessions is related in part to the behavior
of the police during their interrogation of detainees, researchers in this field
(Leo 2002: 37, 2008) call this particular phenomenon “police-induced false
confession”. Leo (1992), comparing interrogation tactics used by the police prior
to 1940 with those that are employed today, demonstrates that the regular use of
physical coercion and psychological duress (“third-degree tactics”) have given
way to new “more subtle and sophisticated psychological interrogation methods
(Leo 2002: 37). As Leo (2002, 2008), Ainsworth (1995), Johnson (1997), and
Kassin and Neumann (1997) point out, most people are not aware that police-
induced false confessions even exist. Leo (2002: 37) notes that,
like many criminal justice officials (especially police and prosecutors), most peo-
ple believe in what I call the myth of psychological interrogation: that an innocent
person will not falsely confess to police unless he or she is physically tortured
or mentally ill (Ainsworth 1995; Johnson 1997; White 1997). This myth is, of
course, completely false. The social science literature has amply documented
that contemporary methods of psychological interrogation can, and sometimes
do, cause cognitively and intellectually normal individuals to give false confes-
sions to serious crimes of which they are entirely innocent (Gudjonsson 1992;
Kassin 1997; Leo and Ofshe 1998).
One high-profile case of the reversal of wrongful convictions related to false

confessions is that of the “Central Park jogger”. In the spring of 1989, a 28-year
old investment broker who was jogging at night in NewYork City’s Central Park,
was found brutally beaten, raped, and left for dead. The severe injuries to her
head left her in a coma, from which she awoke with no memory of what had
happened to her. Five high-school aged boys were arrested and convicted of gang
raping and viciously assaulting her. They were convicted and spent the following
twelve years in prison. Their confessions to the police were instrumental in their
being convicted.
In 2002, a convicted serial rapist and murderer serving time in prison for
his attacks on several women, admitted to having raped and beaten the Central
Park jogger, and DNA evidence corroborated the truth of his claim. Partly as
a result of his admission, the five young men, by then in their twenties, were
freed. This came after the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed a motion
with a judge to have their convictions vacated, a motion that was granted on
December 19, 2002. The other reason why the district attorney decided to ask for
a reversal of the convictions is that the confessions of the five adolescents were
now seen to have been unreliable (e.g., the details they described “were often
wildly inaccurate and inconsistent about ‘who initiated the attack, who knocked
the woman down, who undressed her, who struck her, who held her, who raped
her, what weapons were used in the course of the assault”’) (Saulny 2002). In
fact, soon after the police interrogations, the boys recanted their confessions,
and their defense attorneys argued that their clients had been coerced or tricked
into confessing. Throughout the years that they spent in prison, they persisted in
declaring themselves innocent of the crimes. This persistence was interpreted
by a parole board as a lack of remorse for their crimes, and resulted in its refusal
to reduce their prison terms (Dwyer and Saulny 2002: A24).
Experts on police interrogation explained why these particular boys would
have confessed to such a horrific crime that they had not committed. Drizin con-
siders interrogation to be inherently “antagonistic, accusatory and focused on

leading questions rather than on open lines of inquiry” (Saulny 2002). Further-
more, police interrogators sometimes lie: “they claim to have evidence that they
don’t really have or confessions from accomplices. The more compliant, naı̈ve
or cowed by authority a suspect is, the more likely that person is to confess –
honestly or falsely” (Saulny 2002). Drizin points out that the young or mentally
ill when undergoing interrogation are especially vulnerable to pressure tactics,
and that one of the five youths in the Central Park jogger case had a second-grade
reading level even though he was sixteen, and that another one, a ninth grader,
had an IQ of 87. Finally, there is the factor of length of the interrogation: the boys
were interrogated from between 14 and 30 hours. According to psychologists
Explanations for wrongful convictions 7
Wrightsman and Kassin (1993), when people are interrogated over prolonged
periods of time, they become tired, and also come to the conclusion that denying
a role in the crime will not get them far, and so they say what they believe the
police want to hear – in short, they confess falsely.
The adolescent defendants in the Central Park jogger case represent one
among 125 ‘proven false confessions’, that is, confessions in which “the inno-
cence of the defendant who confessed is or should be beyond dispute” (Drizin
and Leo 2004: 9). These proven false confessions occurred between 1971 and
2002, although 32% of them occurred within the most recent five-year period.
Drizin and Leo (2004: 10) account for this striking finding with the explanation
that either police-induced false confessions are rising or they are coming to light
more frequently. Their analysis of the data demonstrates clearly that “a suspect’s
age is strongly correlated with the likelihood of eliciting a false confession”
(Drizin and Leo 2004: 14). The vast majority are young adults in their twenties
or thirties, and more than half of the false confessors in their sample are under
the age of 25. A third of the sample were minors (under the age of 18). Nearly all
of the false confessors (92%) were men. The nature of the crime that a suspect
is accused of plays an important role in false confessions: 83% of the proven
false confession cases dealt with murder, and the second most commonly oc-
curring crime associated with false confession is rape (Drizin and Leo 2004).
The scholars account for these findings with the explanation of Samuel Gross
(1996), namely that, “police-induced false confessions – as well as wrongful
convictions based on police-induced confession – are more likely to occur in
the most serious cases because there is more pressure on police to solve such
cases” (Drizin and Leo 2004: 16).
Lengthy interrogations are also found to be related to false confessions, a
finding consistent with Wrightsman and Kassin’s (1993) observation. Drizin
and Leo discover the striking finding that whereas routine interrogations in
the U.S. last less than two hours, among interrogations that resulted in proven
false confessions 80% lasted more than six hours, about 60% lasted more than
twelve hours, and 37% lasted longer than a day. These are important findings,
because they confirm the impressions of observers who had noticed that innocent
suspects undergoing lengthy interrogations had their resistance worn down, and
that interrogation length was correlated with the use of psychologically coercive
interrogation techniques.
Today, DNA evidence and the use of audio or video recording of interro-
gations can protect a false confessor from being convicted of a crime s/he did
not commit. Nevertheless, of the 125 factually innocent false confessors who
constituted Drizin and Leo’s sample, 34% were convicted. Of those for whom
sentencing information was obtainable, it was found that 91% had received
sentences of longer than ten years (Drizin and Leo 2004: 22). Most of them
eventually were officially exonerated and/or released from prison. However, the
fact that such a substantial percentage of the false confessors were convicted
and spent years in prison, which is consistent with the findings of experimental
studies (Kassin and Neumann), implies that “confessions may be ‘uniquely po-
tent’ relative to other forms of (falsely) incriminating evidence in their ability to
cause wrongful convictions” (Drizin and Leo 2004: 30). Some false confessors,
fearing a negative outcome of a jury trial, opt for a plea bargain instead. In the
case of these 125 defendants, of those who risked a trial (and 19% did so), 78%
were convicted, “despite the fact that neither the specifics of their confessions
nor any independent evidence supported the prosecutor’s assertion of their guilt
while in most of these cases considerable evidence contradicted it” (Drizin and
Leo 2004: 31). These findings are consistent with parallel findings reported by
Leo and Ofshe (1997), who analyze the conviction rates of sixty false confes-
sors. Yet another study of exonerated defendants (Moran 2007), all of them
on death row, finds that in 65% of 124 cases found between 1973 and 2007,
malfeasance was a factor in the decision to exonerate. The average number of
years that had elapsed from the time of sentencing to the time of exoneration,
in other words the period of incarceration, was 9.2 years. In yet another, more
recent study of exonerations, the first systematic analysis of DNA-based exoner-
ations, Garrett (2008), finds that of 200 defendants proven innocent, 16% were
false confessors, and two-thirds of them were juveniles, mentally retarded, or
both.
3. Police-induced false confessions
The behavior of police detectives at custodial interrogations has been shown to

have its own impact on inducing innocent suspects to admit to crimes that they
have not committed. The impact is what have been called ‘police-induced false
confessions.’ Such confessions, in turn, are considered to fall into five distinct
types: voluntary, stress-compliant, coerced compliant, coerced-persuaded, and
non-coerced persuaded (Ofshe and Leo 1997). This categorization is an exten-
sion of a tri-partite typology previously developed by Kassin and Wrightsman
(1985).
According to Leo (2002: 42), who delineates the typology developed in Of-
she and Leo (1997), ‘voluntary false confessions’ come about either without
police interrogation or during interrogation but with minimal pressure from the
police. Such confessions are made for a number of different reasons, among
them being a desire for notoriety, attention or fame, the desire to help or protect
Police-induced false confessions 9
the true perpetrator of the crime, and the inability to distinguish between reality
and fantasy (Kassin 1997; see also Gudjonsson 1993). ‘Stress–compliant false
confessions’ (known also as ‘coerced-compliant false confessions’ [Memon et
al. 1998: 139]) in contrast, result from the pressures of custodial interrogation,
whereby the suspect feels overwhelmed by “the interrogation environment, the
interrogator’s interpersonal style, and the interrogator’s techniques and strate-
gies” (Leo 2002: 42; Ofshe and Leo 1997). Ofshe and Leo characterize this
type of environment as one that is a cramped and unfamiliar setting, isolation
from social contact and social support, and inability to have any control over
the pace, length or intensity of the questioning (Leo 2002: 42). Leo’s (2002:
42) characterization of the interrogation style that is typical of stress-compliant
false confessions should be reiterated here, since it will be shown that many
of its features were present in the interrogations that I analyze in this book:
these interpersonal styles are a source of distress “as they exert pressure on the
suspect to confess, they may, by turns, be confrontational, insistent, demanding,
overbearing, deceptive, hostile, and manipulative.”
‘Coerced compliant false confessions,’ in contrast, are ones in which “a
suspect confesses in order to escape or avoid an aversive interrogation or to
gain a promised reward” (Kassin 1997: 225; also Gudjonsson 1993: 227). Such
confessions are the result of coercive interrogation techniques, such as threats
and promises, and sometimes end in the suspect’s terminating the interrogation
(Ofshe and Leo 1997; Leo 2002: 43). ‘Coerced-persuaded false confessions,’
the fourth type (known also as ‘coerced-internalized false confessions’ in Gud-
jonsson 1993: 228), are characterized by coercive interrogation techniques that
result in the suspect’s temporarily doubting the accuracy of his memory, lead-
ing him to “believe that he probably did, or logically must have, committed the
crime under question; and confess to it, despite having no memory or knowledge
of participating in or committing the offense” (Leo 2002: 43; Ofshe and Leo
1997). Interestingly, coerced-persuaded false confessions are characterized as
being jointly constructed between the interrogator and the suspect. Finally, ‘non-
coerced-persuaded false confessions’ are similar to coerced-persuaded ones in
terms of structure and logic; however, rather than being the result of “coercive
interrogation techniques,” they are the product of “tactics and techniques of
modern psychologically sophisticated accusatorial interrogation” (Leo 2002:
43; Ofshe and Leo 1997).
The categorization scheme of Ofshe and Leo (1997) omits one additional
confession type and that is the ‘fabricated confession’. According to Gudjonsson
(1993: 220), such confessions are alleged by suspects or defendants not to have
been made by them at all, but rather fabricated by the police. The police, in turn,
allege in such cases that “the defendant made the confession but refused to sign
it” (Graef 1990, as cited in Gudjonsson 1993: 220). According to Gudjonsson,

sometimes suspects do in fact sign confessions that have been fabricated by the
police.
While the definitions presented above serve a useful purpose in distinguish-
ing between the various false confession types, they are not very informative
in illuminating the specific interrogation techniques that result in such unfor-
tunate outcomes. When techniques are mentioned at all, they are couched in
psychological terms rather than in sociolinguistic interactional terms. Thus,
‘confrontational,’ ‘overbearing,’ ‘insistent,’ and ‘demanding’ to be properly un-
derstood need to be characterized in a linguistic manner.
4. Incipient bilingualism and coerced confessions: when the

suspect has limited proficiency in the language of the law
The preceding discussion has reviewed the research findings on the various
factors that promote the likelihood of false confessions. However, those factors
do not include any mention of one important element: language proficiency.
The thesis of this book is that the issue of proficiency in the language of the
interrogation is one that has been overlooked in the research on false confessions.
In a country characterized by a constant, steady influx of immigrants, many of
them having no documentation that would allow them to live or work legally,
the justice system faces the challenge of providing language services to this
ever-growing LEP population, and the first contact that most LEP persons have
with the justice system is with the police. In the post-9/11 era, at both the
federal and state levels of jurisdiction, there is a mood of greater vigilance
over undocumented persons entering the country, stemming from the narrower
issue of national security and fears of terrorism.1 These fears have resulted in
a tougher treatment of persons who are caught living in the U.S.A. illegally,
including keeping them under detention in jail-like holding cells while they
await hearings in court. With respect to immigrants who are convicted of crimes,
the Immigration and Naturalization laws themselves are partly responsible for
lengthy sentences (Rodriguez 1999). According to Rodriguez, when defendants
are in the country illegally, they face two choices: either be deported or stay in
prison while they appeal their case, no matter how long that may take.
The increased mood of vigilance over undocumented persons has led to a new
phenomenon: cooperative agreements between federal immigration authorities
and county or local law enforcement agencies, giving law enforcement officials
the right to exercise immigration enforcement powers. As of 2008 there were
fifty-seven such agreements, known as 287G. One of them enabled a Nashville,
Government response 11
Tennessee police officer to pull over a Mexican woman in her ninth month of
pregnancy for a routine traffic violation normally punishable by a citation, have
her locked up in a medium security section of the county jail, and a few days
later have her guarded by a sheriff’s officer while she gave birth in a hospital,
cuffed to the bed by one foot. After two days of hospitalization, during which
time the woman nursed her infant, the woman was sent back to jail, where
authorities took away from her the breast pump that had been given to her by
hospital staff. After two days of separation from her baby, she developed a breast
infection and the baby developed jaundice. All of this happened because she was
an undocumented person and because she had been deported from the U.S.A.
previously, twelve years earlier (Preston 2008: A1 and A15).
5. Government response to the need for interpreting/

translating services in the administration of justice
Language proficiency in the context of police interrogations becomes an issue
in two ways: the suspect may not have sufficient proficiency in English to com-
municate with the police officer, and the officer may not be proficient in the
language of the suspect. This problem has come to the attention of one high-
level government agency that oversees the administration of justice system of
the U.S.A.: the Department of Justice (DOJ). The response of the DOJ has been
the implementation of an executive order (#13166) issued in 2000 by President
William Clinton, called “Improving Access to Services by Persons with Limited
English Proficiency”. At the moment when this order was decreed, the Assistant
Attorney General for Civil Rights issued a Policy Guidance Document, entitled
“Enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – National Origin
Discrimination Against Persons with Limited English Proficiency”, which has
come to be known as the “DOJ LEP Guidance.” Executive order 13166 mandates
that federal agencies must “assess and address the needs of otherwise eligible
persons seeking access to federally conducted programs and activities who, due
to Limited English proficiency, cannot fully and equally participate in or benefit
from those programs and activities” (U.S. Department of Justice 2001: 3). The
Guidance advises federal departments and agencies to “take reasonable steps to
ensure ‘meaningful’ access [to LEP individuals] to the information and services
they provide” (U.S. Department of Justice 2001: 3).
On beginning to implement the Guidance, the Civil Rights Commission
sponsored a Stakeholder Conference in 2000, which was attended by represen-
tatives of about sixty of the ninety-five federal departments or agencies and
advocacy groups that represent LEP populations, to learn of their views on
how to implement Executive Order 13166 in three areas: oral interpretations,

written translations, and outreach. Among the attendees were representatives of
the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the U.S. Marshalls Service, and the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Out of this conference emerged
a ‘language assistance plan,’ which concluded that “enhanced language assis-
tance measures are warranted” for the following DOJ components: the Civil
Rights Division, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Executive Office of
Immigration Review, U.S. Marshalls Service, Bureau of Prisons, Community
Relations Service, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Admin-
istration, and Executive Office for United States Attorneys. ‘Enhanced language
assistance,’ in turn, was operationalized as recommendations to these agencies
that they advise LEP persons that they have the option of obtaining the services
of an interpreter on their own, at their own expense, or that they can utilize the
services of a competent interpreter provided by the relevant agency. Each agency
was told that it “should take reasonable steps appropriate to the circumstances
to ensure that it provides interpretative services only through individuals who
are competent to provide interpretative services at a level of fluency, compre-
hension, and confidentiality appropriate to the specific nature, type and purpose
of information at issue.” In addition, the agencies were advised to establish a
series of ‘uniform language assistance initiatives’, both oral and written, such
as having in place bilingual or multilingual staff and appropriate translations
of commonly requested information, including “waivers and other law enforce-
ment or detention-related documents affecting important rights and privileges”
(U.S. Department of Justice 2001).
The DOJ LEP Guidance reflects a response of the federal government to
the language needs of a growing immigrant population. How this was to be
effectuated in face-to-face interaction with law enforcement officers was not
specified. One organized attempt at the local level to put into practice the federal
mandate is the Summit/Lorraine, Ohio Project, which represents a joint effort of
a sheriff’s office and a police department, with advice from a national committee
comprising professional court interpreters, interpreter trainers, and linguistics
scholars. The task force conducted a survey of forty-eight law enforcement
agencies in the state of Ohio to find out what sorts of practices were in effect
in their dealings with the LEP population within their jurisdiction. The survey
found that 67% of these agencies have no standard procedure for the use of
interpreters for LEP persons, but that those that do generally rely on family
and friends of LEP persons or bilingual police officers to interpret in a variety
of situations, including domestic violence. Those agencies that do not have
standard procedures make use of police officers, secretaries, janitors, relatives of
the victim, jail inmates and “just about anyone on scene” to serve as interpreters
Organization of the book 13
for police questioning, roadside stops, domestic violence, and jail bookings
(Summit/Lorraine Project 2004: 32).
The task force elaborated a set of prohibitions on the use of non-professional
interpreters by law enforcement agencies. Specifically, the use of children,
family members, friends, bilingual officers or employees regardless of level of
bilingual competency for police interrogations, or bilingual inmates to interpret
“should be expressly prohibited except where there is imminent danger of se-
rious physical harm or death to any person” (Summit/Lorraine Project 2004:
32, emphasis added). Professional interpreters always should be utilized by
law enforcement personnel, the task force recommended. This recommendation
is echoed by the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators
(NAJIT 2006: 2), which considers the role of police officers as either interpreters
or bilingual interrogators to be a highly restricted one: “If the officer’s foreign
language skills were previously tested and documented, bilingual officers can
conduct police business in a foreign language in emergency situations where
no exchange of sensitive information is requested” (emphasis added). NAJIT
warns that because the use of bilingual police officers has resulted in an increas-
ing number of “poorly handled interactions,” which have proved to be prejudicial
to defendants in court, the practice is ill-advised and, therefore, qualified inter-
preters should be the rule instead.
The set of ‘model practices’ outlined in the task force recommendations rep-
resents an ideal to be striven for. In reality, across the U.S.A. law enforcement
agencies make use of the sorts of ad hoc interpreters reported in the task force’s
survey, as will be demonstrated in chapter 2. Chapter 2 reviews appellate cases
covering the period 1965 to 1999, involving issues related to interpreting in
police work. The findings are consistent with the Ohio survey results, revealing
the judicial thinking that underlies the general tendency of both trial and ap-
pellate courts to dismiss the arguments of defendants that they have not been
afforded equal justice for lack of qualified interpreters in the pre-trial phases of
the judicial process.
6. Organization of the book

Chapters 3 through 8 of this book present case studies involving Latino detainees
who underwent custodial interrogations by the police without the presence of a
non-partisan court interpreter. Chapter 3 presents a case in which an appellate
court reversed a murder conviction on the basis of improper conduct by a police
detective and his partner, who had been designated interpreter for the detective
and the suspect. Chapter 4, which is based on the same case, shows that a young
man with very limited proficiency in English can resist police attempts to elicit
a confession to attempted rape.
Whereas the detective/interpreter in chapters 3 and 4 can be seen to be limited
in his ability to speak Spanish, the interrogators in chapters 5 and 7 are fluent
Spanish/English bilingual Latinos. Although they share the detainees’ mother
tongue, in both cases their ethnicity does not match that of their detainee in-
terlocutors. In the case analyzed in chapter 5, the interactional behavior of the
police detective is shown to be coercive and succeeds in producing a confession
from the suspect. In the other case, while there is no recording of the interro-
gation speech event, there is linguistic and extralinguistic evidence indicating
that the detainee was treated brutally. In fact, his case is so convincing that it
has been taken up by a team of innocence project lawyers.
Chapter 6 analyzes the interrogation of a highly limited English-speaking
Latino by an equally limited speaker of Spanish. The result is a sociopragmatic
breakdown in communication (Thomas 1983). The detainee decided to plead
guilty of the crime of which he was accused – child molestation – rather than to
risk being convicted by a jury and possibly spending his life in prison. Neverthe-
less, he was released on probation after a brief incarceration, the evidence against
him being weak enough to persuade the judicial authorities of the defendant’s
credibility.
In sum, this book seeks to demonstrate that the role of language in contexts
of bilingual police interrogations has been overlooked as a significant factor
in prompting confessions. If some of these confessions are false, it is because
police interpreters are unable to remain in interpreter footing, and may not see
themselves as anything but police officers. This book does not, of course, seek
to determine the guilt or innocence of the defendants whose cases are analyzed.
Rather, the book seeks to determine if the accused received due process of law.
Chapter 2
Interpreting for the police: issues in pre-trial phases
of the judicial process
The role of interpreters in legal settings has become relatively formalized for
proceedings that take place at the tail end of the judicial process, that is, in
speech events that are bound to the courtroom. At the front end of judicial
process, however, where the crime scene and police station hold center stage,
no such guarantee exists for the person in need of interpreting services. This
chapter examines the problematic nature of interpreting in the initial phases of
judicial process.
The chapter addresses several issues of interest to forensic linguistics. One
of these is the absence of clear-cut demarcations between certain sorts of legal
actors and others (e.g., court interpreters, community interpreters, and police
interpreters). Other issues include the legitimacy with which such actors perform
their function (i.e., the authorization backing them to carry out their designated
roles), and the shifting of roles between one sort of official function and another
(e.g., between interrogating officer and interpreter). The evidence presented here
seeks to show that categories such as ‘court interpreter’ and ‘legal interpreter’
are cover-terms that encompass the work of a broad range of actors routinely
found on the forensic scene. I will try to demonstrate that in the legal speech
context of the police interview and/or interrogation (held either at the crime
scene or at the police station)2 , persons alternately known as ‘interpreters’ and,
sometimes mistakenly, as ‘translators’3 come in various forms. Sometimes they
are trained for their work. However, just as often not, they move in and out of
their designated role into other roles, not officially called for. In addition, by
virtue of their relationship to either their employer or to the party for whom
they are interpreting, they sometimes violate some of the basic rules of the
interpreting profession.
Evidence for the problematic nature of interpreting and translating associ-
ated with police work will be drawn from a review of appellate cases, in which
the issue of interpreting was either a basis for appeal or taken note of in some
way by the courts. Whereas the setting in which police interpreting is carried out
is typically an out-of-court legal environment, the product of such interpreting
is a written version of what an examinee has reported to an officially designated
interviewer. Thus, the product of this type of speech event is often a written
record, in the form of a verbatim-like transcript of the sort produced by court re-
porters. In addition, police interrogations of crime suspects are frequently audio
16 Interpreting for the police: issues in pre-trial phases of the judicial process
or videotaped, which serves the dual purpose of providing police transcribers

with the basis for their transcriptions and leaving for attorneys a visual and/or
oral record of what was said at a given interrogation for future reference in case
the suspect is tried for the crime.
The present analysis will show that the activity of interpreters and translators
in police interviews, interrogations and related law enforcement investigative
work has frequently been viewed as problematic by defendants in criminal cases,
evidence of this being the numerous instances of appeals of convictions on pre-
cisely this basis. The bases for such appeals have to do with the qualifications of
the interpreters or translators who served the police. The most frequent criticism
leveled at interpreters/translators at work in police questioning is that they have
failed to administer to detainees the Miranda warnings, or cautions, as will be
shown below. Secondly, the interpretations and translations of police officers are
often questioned when these officers have played an active role in arresting the
suspect (e.g., in cases where the translator of covertly taped telephone conversa-
tions later used as evidence in court was the undercover police officer, or in some
instances, police informant, who is alleged to have helped entrap the defendant).
Thirdly, the interpretations/translations of police officers are often objected to
by defense attorneys on the grounds that they constitute hearsay. Finally, a com-
mon reason for appealing convictions on the basis of poor interpreting is the
use of family members or friends of the accused at police interrogations. Such
interpreters, too, have been faulted by defense attorneys for less-than-objective
interpreting. A review of specific cases, which follows, will shed light on the
sorts of arguments that lawyers have made in appealing convictions.
1. The interpreting continuum
Whether it is inside the police station or out in the streets, from the observer’s
standpoint there appears to be a constant element of unpredictability as to what

sort of interpreter will be employed by the police at any given moment. In the
course of police investigations of crimes, as the appellate cases reveal, the role
of the interpreter is played by police officers (both undercover and overtly distin-
guishable), police informants, employees of the police station other than officers,
relatives of detainees or suspects, co-conspirators of suspects, children of crime
victims, respected members of the community, fellow inmates of prisoners, and
even detainees themselves.
This leads me to ask the fundamental question, “Are there any limits on who
can be called on to serve as an interpreter in a legal setting?” The answer lies
in the distinctions among ‘court interpreting’, ‘legal interpreting’, and ‘com-
The interpreting continuum 17
munity interpreting’. As Benmaman (1997), Pöchhacker (1997) and Roberts

(1997) point out, the distinctions among these three concepts are generally
fuzzy. Roberts (1997: 8), in her attempt to clarify the “nebulous concept” of
community interpreting, considers community interpreting to subsume within
it public service interpreting, medical interpreting and legal interpreting, but
points out that the term ‘community interpreting’ is often used synonymously
with all three, as well as with the terms ‘cultural interpreting’, ‘dialogue inter-
preting’, ‘ad hoc interpreting’, and ‘liaison interpreting’. What they all have in
common, she says, is “the fact that they are all used for interpreting in a setting
other than a conference” (Roberts 1997: 8). For her, community interpreting is
the sort of ad hoc interpreting defined by Collard-Abbas (1989: 81, as cited in
Roberts 1997: 8) as, “the type of interpreting done to assist those immigrants
who are not native speakers of the language to gain full and equal access to
statutory services (legal, health, education, local government, social services).”
Roberts (1997: 15), citing the work of Giovanni (1992), notes that the commu-
nity interpreter usually tries to establish a positive connection with the client,
taking on both an “assistance” approach as well as an “advocacy” approach.
Furthermore, the community interpreter typically is a volunteer (Roberts 1997:
18). All of these observations have a direct bearing on the type of interpreting
that frequently goes on in police interviews.
The term ‘legal interpreting’ has been used interchangeably with ‘court in-
terpreting’ and ‘judiciary interpreting’, Benmaman (1997: 180) notes. Colin
and Morris (1996:xii), for example, use a single term, ‘court interpreter’, to
include interpreters who perform interpreting in the courts as well as those who
work in other sorts of legal settings. Benmaman chooses to distinguish between
these terms, explaining that court interpreting (synonymous with ‘judiciary in-
terpreting’) “is but one form of legal interpreting which shares many common
characteristics with other types of legal interpreting” (Benmaman 1997: 181).
Benmaman (1997: 181) defines legal interpreting and court interpreting in the
following way:
Legal interpreting refers to all situations in the legal domain in which interpreter
services are performed. These situations include: interviews in law enforcement
offices at the local, state and federal levels; attorney-client interviews, which may
occur in the attorney’s office, in a public service agency, or at a jail; depositions;
administrative hearings in state and federal agencies dealing with such issues as
social security, worker’s compensation, unemployment and disability, and immi-
gration and naturalization; landlord/tenant disputes; family court matters; grand
jury hearings; interviews with probation and other court-related agencies; and all
court appearances in the various stages of civil and criminal litigation. Court inter-
preting refers normally to simultaneous and consecutive interpretation, and sight
and written translation provided for court officials and minimal-English speaking
litigants during evidentiary and non-evidentiary proceedings. This term includes
interpreting during interviews in case-related matters outside the courtroom.
Benmaman goes into detail delineating the differences between legal interpret-
ing and court interpreting, noting, among other things, that the primary focus
of activity of court interpreters is the courtroom, whether they are staff em-
ployees of a court system or are employed by different courts on a contractual
basis. However, and this is of greatest relevance to the present analysis, despite
the differences, says Benmaman,“. . . the code of professional responsibility of
the interpreter in any legal setting is the same,” and “whatever the setting, and
most unequivocally in any legal setting, the interpreter must maintain standards
of professional performance to allow for the exchange of information without
misrepresentation, or interjection of personal bias” (Benmaman 1997: 184).
The present study will show that in legal settings other than the courtroom
itself, a continuum of interpreter types is at work, from non-professional com-
munity interpreters (such as friends and family members of the person needing
interpreting services), to volunteer interpreters who have had some professional
training, to judicial staff with little or no training in interpreting but who are
called in to interpret on a regular basis because they are bilingual, to staff court
interpreters who either may or may not hold state or federal certification. Ap-
pellate cases do not always reveal clearly what the qualifications were of the
interpreter present at a police interview or interrogation, or of the translator re-
sponsible for converting non-English tape-recorded speech (e.g., covertly taped
telephone conversations, non-English dialogue between bilingual police officer
and suspect) into English-language transcripts. Nevertheless, of importance to
those interested in forensic linguistics is the fact that the product of such inter-
preter/translator interventions, namely police transcripts, are routinely submitted
at trial for evidentiary purposes. One therefore ought to question the validity
of some of those transcripts, given their potential importance to both defense
counsel and prosecution alike.
2. The problem of conflict of interest

A key issue in what should be considered necessary qualifications for serving
as a legal interpreter is the question of impartiality, together with the closely
related issue of conflict of interest. To my knowledge, in every code of ethics
written for court interpreters and legal interpreters there are explicit warnings
regarding the need for interpreter impartiality and the consequent requirement
that interpreters must excuse themselves from a given assignment whenever a
The problem of conflict of interest 19
conflict of interest on their part either exists or merely has the appearance of
existing.
Several illustrations of interpreter guidelines support this contention. For
example, two handbooks currently in use in the United Kingdom, Non-English
Speakers and the English Legal System: A Handbook to Good Practice for those
Working in the Legal System across Language and Culture (Corsellis 1995) and
the 1996 edition of the syllabus for the Diploma in Public Service Interpreting
(Institute of Linguistics Educational Trust) both refer to the need for impartiality
and the requirement that the interpreter “disclose immediately if the interviewee
or immediate family is known or related” (Institute of Linguistics Educational
Trust 1996: 23). The latter guide specifies (Institute of Linguistics 1996: 24)
that “the interpreter must be reasonably satisfied that . . . s/he is, and is seen
to be, in a position of neutrality. Interpreters should not accept assignments
involving relatives or people with whom they are closely involved at work or at
home or in situations where the interpreter’s impartiality might be challenged
without prior consent of both the English and non-English speaking clients.”
With respect to interpreting for the police, in particular, another set of guidelines
used in England, the Metropolitan Police Handbook (Colin and Morris 1996: 29)
warns interpreters to avoid, “becoming personally involved in an investigation;
assisting prisoners, witnesses or victims; having contact with anyone involved
in a case (this includes families, witnesses, solicitors, etc., as well as the person
you are actually interpreting for) other than in an official context . . . ” Colin
and Morris (1996: 46), referring to the use of police officers as interpreters
for arrested persons in England and Wales, say that, “A police officer is not
necessarily prohibited from interpreting at an interview of a detained persons,
although the practice is undesirable for reasons of impartiality. However, when
an interpreter is needed in order for the suspect to obtain legal advice, a police
officer is not allowed to act as interpreter.” Mildren (1999: 137), writing about
the situation ofAustralianAboriginal people in the criminal justice system, faults
the Australian police for utilizing friends of prisoners as their legal interpreters.
Concurring with Cooke (1998), Mildren (1999: 137) states that, “. . . the role
of the prisoner’s friend is in conflict with that of the interpreter. The latter must
be impartial, but the former is required to be partisan. Prisoner’s friends are
rarely competent interpreters; their main function is to advise the suspect, and
to assist him during the interviewing process to choose freely whether to speak
or to remain silent.”
In the U.S.A., wherever states or state-related institutions (e.g., the National
Center for State Courts) have taken measures to guarantee quality interpreting in
the judicial system, they have included the requirement of impartiality on the part
of court interpreters. In a set of model guidelines for state courts related to court
interpreting (Hewitt 1995: 202), the National Center for State Courts includes
“impartiality and avoidance of conflict of interest”, which is defined as follows:
“Interpreters shall be impartial and unbiased and shall refrain from conduct
that may give an appearance of bias. Interpreters shall disclose any real or
perceived conflict of interest.” A commentary on this canon is provided (Hewitt
1995: 202–203) by the book of guidelines: “The interpreter should avoid any
conduct or behavior that presents the appearance of favoritism toward any of the
parties. Interpreters should maintain professional relationships with their clients,
and should not take an active part in any of the proceedings. The interpreter
should discourage a non-English speaking party’s personal dependence.” Then,
specifying the “circumstances that are presumed to create actual or apparent
conflicts of interest for interpreters where interpreters should not serve,” the
guide includes cases in which “the interpreter is a friend, associate, or relative
of a party or counsel for a party involved in the proceedings” (Hewitt 1995: 203).
Consistent with these guidelines are those listed in the Standards of Profes-
sional Conduct and Responsibilities for Members of the Judiciary Interpreters
Association of Texas, which specifies that a conflict of interest on the inter-
preter’s part exists when “the interpreter is acquainted with any party to the
action (excluding judges and lawyers)” (Berk-Seligson 2002: 230). The code
of ethics specifies, in forceful language, that interpreters are prohibited from
giving advice of any kind to the non-English speaking person, “even when re-
quested to do so,” and advises interpreters to refer the client to his/her counsel
for advice (Berk-Seligson 2002: 230–231). Similarly, a code of ethics proposed
by the New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Interpreter and Translation
Services includes wording regarding the need for court interpreters and legal
translators to maintain impartiality “in all matters and toward all parties and
should avoid any appearance of bias,” which means that “Court interpreters and
legal translators should not render services in any matter in which they are asso-
ciates, friends, or relatives of a party or of counsel for a party” (Berk-Seligson
2002: 235). Federal guidelines on ethical conduct for court interpreters, embod-
ied in the “Code of Professional Responsibility of the Official Interpreters of
the United States Courts,” reiterate the canons agreed to by state associations,
namely that they must interpret “accurately and faithfully without indicating any
personal bias, avoiding even the appearance of partiality,” and the mechanism for
maintaining impartiality is “avoiding undue contact with witnesses, attorneys,
and defendants and their families, and any contact with jurors” (González et al.
1991: 585). Interestingly, no mention is made of interpreters needing to excuse
themselves from a case if they are friends or family of the defendant or plaintiff.
The wording of the federal canons is vaguer than that found in state-related
organizations.
The problem of conflict of interest 21
Noticeably absent from all of these guidelines is any mention of the possi-
bility of bias on the part of police officers, or associates of police officers, when
acting as interpreters. However, as the review of appellate cases below will show,
despite the fact that court interpreter guidelines do not mention this potential
problem, defense attorneys of persons convicted of various sorts of crimes are
increasingly becoming aware of the inherent conflict of interest present in situ-
ations where law enforcement officers unexpectedly play the role of interpreter.
The fact that court interpreting guidelines all make reference to the need for
interpreter impartiality suggests the pervasiveness of this problem for those who
work in the profession. The problem often stems from the fact that clients for
whom legal interpreters provide their services become emotionally dependent
on their interpreters, seeing them as potential saviors, providing not only a
linguistic, but also a cultural and psychological haven, as Morris (1999: 6) notes.
Altano (1990: 99), referring specifically to the witness-interpreter relation-
ship, calls it “intricate”. He explains, “The degree to which a stranger may rely
on the interpreter, both emotionally and practically, may come as a surprise, yet
it is more the rule than the exception,” and while it is important for the inter-
preter to maintain a professional distance from the party, “court interpreters may
admit to a certain empathy for the witness and the circumstances” (Altano 1990:
99). Thus, says Altano (1990: 100), while the judge may be able to keep him or
herself aloof from defendants and witnesses, “the court interpreter is perched
precariously between professional impartiality and a complex link to the wit-
ness.” If this is the case in the courtroom proper, the chances of impartiality in
less formal legal settings are apt to be lower, where not forty pairs of eyes are
on the interpreter, but only two (e.g., those of a police officer and a detainee).
The present review of appellate cases dealing with interpreting issues re-
lated to police investigations reveals that the use of inappropriate interpreters
(as defined by institutions that provide guidelines for professional interpreters) is
quite common, although the use of such potentially biased interpreters, surpris-
ingly, is not generally a basis for appeal. Why this is so is not known, although
speculation would lead one to two explanations. First, in contrast to much of
Europe, the interpreting/translating profession in the U.S.A. has neither enjoyed
high prestige nor has it had a history of professionalization. Unlike in many
European countries, where professional interpreters/translators are required to
study the theory and methods of this field at the university level, and higher
degrees or certificates in interpreting/translating are commonly available, in the
U.S.A. formal education in this field is not a requirement of employment in
virtually any type of occupational sphere, be it legal or medical, and programs
of study at colleges and universities are few and far-between (see Berk-Seligson
2002, chapter 10, for details). The highest level of interpreter certification in
the U.S.A., that attained by passing the Federal Court Interpreters examination,
tests knowledge of grammar and vocabulary equivalent to two years of university
education. In Belgium and Holland (Hertog 1996) and in Sweden (Schweda-
Nicholson 1999), for example, interpreters/translators are required to complete
four years of education beyond secondary school, including specialized train-
ing in translating and interpreting. They are also more highly paid compared to
legal interpreters in the U.S.A. A second reason why the use of inappropriate
interpreters is not a common basis of appeal in American courts is that judges
and lawyers are poorly educated about the interpreting/translating profession,
and generally operate under the common misconception that being bilingual
is not merely a necessary but also a sufficient qualification for competence
in interpreting/translating. Most are unaware of the specialized skills required
to perform simultaneous and consecutive interpreting, and of the particularly
arduous cognitive efforts that high quality interpreting demands.
When interpreting is questioned at the appeals court level, it is the quality
of interpretations that comes under scrutiny (i.e., were there errors made in
the conversion of source language to target language). Interestingly, guidelines
for court interpreters make no mention of the possibility of bias or conflict of
interest on the part of law enforcement officials. Nevertheless, the majority of
defense counsel grounds for appeal related to the investigative phase of a de-
fendant’s judicial processing in cases involving court interpreters have to do
with the actions of either police officers serving as interpreters or of interpreters
who work for the police force. It is also worthwhile noting, in this respect, that
it is not always clear from appellate reviews whether the ‘police interpreter’
in a given case was in fact a police officer, since in many cases the word ‘in-
terpreter’ is used without a modifier, as is the misused term ‘translator’ when
clearly the oral medium, rather than the written one, was involved. Therefore,
frequently it remains unclear whether the person referred to was a staff court
interpreter employed by a nearby courthouse, a freelance interpreter working
for an agency that has a contractual relationship with the police headquarters, a
bilingual employee of the police station, or even a bilingual police officer who
serves as an interpreter on an as-needed basis. For this reason, it is difficult in
many cases to tell from the appellate judgments exactly what sort of interpreter
was at work, when the quality of the interpreter’s performance is not in question.
This indeterminacy stems from the fact that in any given case involving a person
whose proficiency in the language of the courts is limited, a chain of interpreters
will have been utilized, of the types just mentioned (Colin and Morris 1996).
The review of appellate cases that follows gives us an inkling of what sorts of
interpreters serve as links in that chain, particularly at the nexus where police
work comes into play.
Interpreters for the police: a review of appellate cases 23
3. Interpreters for the police: a review of appellate cases
Using a Lexis-Nexis computerized search procedure, I examined appellate cases

from 1965 to 1999 in California, Florida and New York. Spanish-English inter-
preting comprises over 90% of interpreting in state and federal courts in the
U.S.A., and most likely in municipal courts as well, which is why Spanish-Eng-
lish interpreting is the focus of this book. California, Florida, and New York
were selected as the focus of this chapter because they have a large number of
Spanish speakers. In addition, the three states chosen represent demographic
concentrations of three important subgroups of the U.S. Hispanic population:
Mexican-Americans in California (a subgroup that typifies the Southwest region
of the country), Cuban-Americans in Florida, and Puerto Ricans and Domini-
cans in New York. The cases were searched by using the key word ‘police’ with
the stem ‘interpret-’, and ‘police’ with the stem ‘translat-‘. Of a total of 112 ap-
pellate cases that emerged through the search procedure, forty-seven came from
California, seventeen were from Florida, and sixty-four were from New York.
All of the California and Florida cases were examined, and forty-eight of the
total New York cases were selected.4 Many cases were rejected for analysis on
the basis of their irrelevance to the study. Irrelevant cases appeared because the
computer search blindly produces cases where the key words appear in close
proximity. Thus, for example, since the key words were ‘translat-‘ and ‘inter-
pret’, in a fifty-word proximity to the word ‘police’, the search would bring up
the two former lexemes even when they were used in a more general, abstract
sense (e.g., “this judicial principle translates into . . . ”), and not in the techni-
cal sense of rendering Language 1 as Language 2. With these irrelevant cases
winnowed out of the original pool, forty-nine cases remained for analysis.
Evidence emerging from this corpus of appeals indicates that police offi-
cers routinely are used as interpreters in the earliest investigative phases of a
criminal case as well as during interviews and interrogations carried out in the
police station. They also are used as interpreters of audio- or video-recorded

non-English language statements of suspects/detainees, which they convert into
English for police stenographers, or else translate and type themselves. In addi-
tion, they either interpret orally for stenographers, or translate and type them-
selves, taped-recordings gathered covertly by other police officers during un-
dercover operations. Finally, they often must testify in trials regarding the role
they have played as interpreters or translators during the investigative phases of
given cases. Police activity as interpreters/translators has led defense attorneys
of convicted persons to question such activity for various reasons, as will be
shown below.
3.1. Police officers as interpreters and translators
The following section presents cases in which police officers served as inter-
preters. Many of these cases led to appeals on the part of the convicted defen-
dants, but few convictions have been overturned. Ortega v. State represents one
of the successful cases in which a conviction was in fact reversed on grounds
involving the use of a police officer to interpret for a jury a defendant’s sworn
statement at his custodial interrogation.
Ortega v. State. In the 1998 appellate case of Jorge Ortega v. State of Florida, Or-
tega, the appellant, who had been convicted for conspiracy to traffic in cocaine,
argued that the trial court had erred in allowing a law enforcement officer to
translate for the jury the Spanish portion of a videotaped statement he had given
to the police under interrogation. Ortega’s argument was that since the police of-
ficer had been one of the ones to take the statement from him, he then should not
have been permitted to act as interpreter in court, especially not for the purpose
of interpreting the videotaped statement. The three judges were in agreement that
an error had occurred with respect to the police detective’s “translation” of the
statements. Apparently the police detective/interpreter, during the videotaping
of Ortega’s statement to the police, had done only summary interpreting for Or-
tega (i.e., reducing his testimony to the “gist” of it), rather than, as Acting Chief
Judge Blue put it, providing a “literal translation” (i.e., verbatim interpretation)
on the videotape. In contrast, the detective had “acted as interpreter for the other
detective” (which I take to mean that he had done consecutive or simultaneous
interpreting for him). Furthermore, in a pretrial motion, the defense attorney had
asked the judge to “have the videotape translated by a proper and sworn trans-
lator.” This motion was denied by the trial court, and when the defense objected
to the prosecution’s introduction of the testimony at the trial, the objection was
overruled as well. The jury watched the videotape, and in order to answer the
prosecution’s questions, the detective who had acted as interpreter was allowed
to provide a more extensive rendition than the one he had given on the videotape,
at the police station. When Ortega took the stand, he testified that the detective
interpreter had not translated everything accurately on the videotape.
In his appeal, Ortega argued that the trial court had erred when it overruled his
objections and allowed the detective/interpreter (named Formosa) to translate
statements that were heard on the videotape. The panel of judges agreed. Their
argumentation is worth quoting: “We agree and see several problems with the
procedure used below. First, Detective Formosa was involved in the case and
therefore lacked at least the appearance of impartiality that one would expect
of an interpreter. While the appointment of a translator is generally a matter for
the trial court’s discretion, the translator should be qualified and impartial . . .
Second, while Detective Formosa took the oath for a witness, he was not required
to take the oath set forth for interpreters and translators under section 90.606,
Florida Statutes (1995).” Judge Blue cited another Florida case (Hutchens v.
State, 469 So. 2d 924 (Fla 3d DCA 1985)), in which an appeals court had found it
an error to allow the jury to listen to a lengthy tape-recording in Spanish, “without
having such recording translated into English for the jurors by an interpreter
sworn to give a faithful and accurate translation, despite the defendant’s clear,
but overruled, request that he do so.” Ortega’s conviction was reversed.
People v. Márquez. A recurring issue that appears among the cases of police
officers serving as interpreters is that of the proper administration of the Miranda
rights, or police caution. An appellate case coming out of the California Supreme
Court involving the improper handling of the Miranda warnings by a police
officer interpreter, People v. Márquez (1992), comes to a different conclusion
about the defendant’s appeal. Márquez was convicted for the first-degree murder
of Ascención Hernández, and for the second-degree murder of Anel Rodrı́guez,
which he committed in the course of a robbery and burglary, respectively. The
defendant testified at his trial that after his arrest he was questioned by a Spanish-
speaking detective by the name of Parrott, and that Detective Parrott promised
him that his pregnant wife (who was also in custody, not for any involvement in
the murders, but because illegal drugs had been found in their apartment) would
be released if he told the detective what she wanted to hear. Márquez testified
that he had answered “yes” to everything that Detective Parrott asked, but that
he had not understood everything she said because he could not understand
her Spanish (People v. Márquez 1992: 4). The defendant’s girlfriend (whom he
referred to as his wife) also testified that she had had difficulty in understanding
Detective Parrott’s Spanish.
At an Evidence Code hearing, Márquez made a motion to suppress the state-
ments he had made at the police station on the ground that the Miranda warnings
given to him there were constitutionally defective. Specifically, he argued that
he had not waived his Miranda rights knowingly and voluntarily, and that he had
made his statements involuntarily, on the understanding that if he made them, his
pregnant wife would be released (People v. Márquez 1992: 8). His implication
was that the detective had used coercive tactics on him. Detective Parrott, in
contrast, testified that she had in fact informed Márquez of his Miranda rights
and had done so by reading them from a Spanish-language printed card. How-
ever, a court interpreter who was asked to examine the wording of the Miranda
rights that had been read to the defendant expressed the opinion that some of
the words on the card might have been confusing.
The California Supreme Court found that Detective Parrott had in fact read
the defendant his rights, and that he had understood them, and that he had given
them up freely and voluntarily. Thus, the appellate court upheld the trial court’s
findings. Most interesting from the perspective of the present study is the fact
that the defendant contended that the trial court had erred in failing to exclude
his statement on the grounds of due process, “because the police officer was also
an investigating officer and an interested party, and the statements were not tape-
recorded.” The opinion of the California Supreme Court was that the defendant
“mischaracterized” the record as to Detective Parrott’s fluency in Spanish.
She testified that she was fluent as to everyday matters and the Spanish spoken in
the area defendant is from, but that her Spanish might be lacking when it came to
an intellectual discussion. Defendant’s characterization of Detective Parrott as an
interested party and improper interpreter is premised on authorities and standards
relating to court interpreters at trial. Detective Parrott was not acting as a court
interpreter; she functioned as a facilitator for the police investigation. Thus the
standards for court interpreters have no application.
The court ended by adding, “Finally, the argument for excluding statements
unless they are tape-recorded has been made and rejected before” (See People
v. Marshall (1990) 50 Cal. 3d 907, 925). The decision of the court was to affirm
the conviction of Márquez.
The position taken by the California Supreme Court, that police officer in-
terpreters are different from interpreters who work in court is surprising, but
reflects the reality of the situation: apparently the former are not expected to ad-
here to the kinds of ethical codes that professional court interpreters are told to
follow. If police officer interpreters are fundamentally “facilitators for the police
investigation”, then there would appear to be a position of bias inherent in this
role, a bias in the direction of helping the police obtain what they need for the
successful resolution of a case. From this perspective, police officer interpreters
are considered to be no different from community interpreters, except that the
party for which they serve as advocate is the police department, rather than the
detainee.
People v. González. In a high-profile case in which eighty-seven people died

in a fire at a New York social club, the improper interpretation of the Miranda
warnings became a ground for appeal. Julio González, who admitted to and was
convicted for setting the fire, claimed that he had not been given his Miranda
warnings (People v. González 1991). The Supreme Court of New York ruled,
however, that there had been only minor discrepancies in translation when the po-
lice reiterated the defendant’s rights to him before he made his videotaped state-
ment, and that these discrepancies were inconsequential. The appellate judges
reasoned that although the detective interpreter had not “mouthed a ritualistic
formula”, he had in fact “conveyed the substance of the Miranda rights” to the
defendant (People v. González 1991: 1–2).5 Evidence of the adequate interpret-
ing of those rights, argued the judges, was the defendant’s “calm demeanor and
cooperative manner”, as captured on videotape. These were indications of the
voluntary nature of González’s confession, according to the judges. In addition,
they stressed that simultaneous interpreting had been carried out, and that the
officer who had acted as interpreter for Gonzalez was fluent in Spanish.
People v.Torres. Another recurring theme that appears in appeals cases involving
police interpreters is that of hearsay. Eight such cases appear in the corpus.
Specifically, the issue is whether statements made by a defendant through an
interpreter while in police custody during the investigative phase of a case can
be considered hearsay when quoted in a trial. People v. Torres (1989) is typical
of such cases. Since the California Court of Appeal was particularly thorough
in reviewing the case law pertinent to the issue, it is worthwhile highlighting
here the most important arguments that were made. The opinions of the three
appellate judges, who concurred with one another, merit quoting because of the
distinction that they make between court interpreters who normally work in the
courtroom and interpreters who come into play at earlier phases of the judicial
process, such as at police interrogations.
FidelTorres was convicted of being an accessory after the fact to the homicide
of Jesus Rodriguez, and was sent to state prison for two years. Torres’ friend,
Mario López, had killed Jesús Rodrı́guez because he believed that Rodrı́guez
was having an affair with his wife. Because Torres drove Rodrı́guez to the scene
of the homicide and away from it, he was found guilty of being an accessory after
the fact. One of the grounds on which Torres appealed the conviction was that
the testimony at his trial by the police officer who had served as his interpreter
at the police station was hearsay.
On the night of his arrest, Torres spontaneously – in highly limited English –

admitted to Sergeant David Knickerbocker, the officer assigned to investigat-
ing this case, his role in the homicide. His admission came forth without any
interrogation on Sergeant Knickerbocker’s part. After the admission was made,
questioning began, without a reading of the Miranda rights to Torres. In the
course of the questioning, at the point when he wanted to ask Torres about his
role in the murder, Sergeant Knickerbocker called in a Spanish-speaking offi-
cer, Dale Wagner, to read the Miranda warnings to Torres in Spanish. Before the
arrival of Officer Wagner, Torres volunteered that López had forced him to drive
at gunpoint to and from Rodrı́guez’s house. At the trial, the defendant moved
to exclude this volunteered statement, but the court denied the motion. Torres
contended, in his appeal, that the court had erred in admitting the statement that
he had volunteered. The defendant argued that the statement was inadmissible
because it was the tainted product of a previous Miranda violation. The appellate
court disagreed.
Of greater interest to the present analysis is Torres’ contention regarding tes-
timony given by a police interpreter who had assisted him during a subsequent
interrogation, three days after his arrest and incarceration. At that time, Torres
called the police from jail to say that he wanted to make a statement concerning
the Rodrı́guez homicide. He was interviewed in jail by Sergeant Greer, a detec-
tive who could neither speak nor understand Spanish, with Officer Wagner once
again serving as his interpreter. Torres was advised of his Miranda rights, but
waived them.6
At the trial, Wagner was asked about his qualifications as an interpreter,
and testified that his translations of Sergeant Greer’s questions and Torres’ an-
swers had been accurate. Interestingly, the appeals court does not mention what
Sergeant Wagner’s qualifications were, nor does it suggest that a certified inter-
preter should have independently verified the accuracy of the interpretations.
When Sergeant Greer was put on the witness stand, he was asked about the
statements that Torres had made during the police interview. It was at this point
that the defense objected, calling Greer’s testimony hearsay. The objection was
overruled.
In his appeal, Torres contended that, “Sergeant Greer’s testimony was in-
admissible hearsay because Greer testified not to defendant’s statements but
merely to the translations made by Officer Wagner” (People v. Torres 1989: 6).
To support his contention he cited three early Supreme Court decisions (People
v. John 1902; People v. Ah Yute 1880; People v. Lee Fat 1880). In all three cases
the prosecution tried to have testimony given by the defendant at a previous
judicial proceeding admitted into evidence. The Supreme Court ruled that in
each case, “the testimony constituted inadmissible hearsay, because the reporter
transcribed ‘[the statements] from the lips of the interpreter, and not from the
defendant”’ (People v. Torres 1989: 6). The Supreme Court held that the trial
court should not have allowed a witness to testify to what the interpreter says
the declarant stated, but that instead, it should have been the interpreter or some
other witness who understood the statements of the declarant to be the one to
testify (three other California Court of Appeals cases are cited to bolster this
argument) (People v. Torres 1989: 6).
In the case of Torres, however, the California appellate court ruled that the
holdings of the early Supreme Court cases were not applicable, because, “In
those cases, the interpreters were officers of the court and were not specifically
selected by parties who desired to communicate with each other but needed
an interpreter to do so” (People v. Torres 1989: 6) The appellate court argued

that, “When two persons speaking different languages select an interpreter as a
medium of their communication, the interpreter is regarded as their joint agent
for that purpose. Therefore, the statements of the interpreter ‘are regarded as
the statements of the persons themselves; and like any other admission may
be shown by the testimony of any person who heard them without calling the
interpreter as a witness”’ (People v. Torres 1989: 6). This is equivalent to saying
that, “A party may make an interpreter his agent to communicate; when this
has been the case, the interpreter’s statements are virtually the extra-judicial
admissions of the party’s agent, and thus are receivable, from anyone who heard
them, without calling the interpreter” (Wigmore, Evidence, par.812, subd. (4),
p. 283) n2, as cited in People v. Torres 1989: 6–7). The appellate judges noted,
however, that not all jurisdictions have accepted this agency analysis, and that
those that have not “hold that any extrajudicial statement made through an
interpreter is inadmissible as hearsay when the witness understood the statement,
not as originally spoken, but as translated by the interpreter” (People v. Torres
1989: 7).
Of particular relevance to the subject of this analysis is the comment of the
chief judge that, “The agency theory applies to statements made through an
interpreter unless circumstances are present which would negate the presump-
tion of agency. Factors tending to refute such an inference include a substantial
possibility that the interpreter had a motive to misrepresent, such as an interest
in shifting suspicion to the accused and away from the interpreter, or a lack of
capacity or demonstrated incompetence on the part of the translator” (People
v. Torres 1989: 7).
Furthermore, the court concluded,
The fact that the interpreter is a law enforcement officer or other employee of
government does not prevent the interpreter from acting as the declarant’s agent,
even as here where the defendant is being investigated by law enforcement. More-
over, the fact that the interpreter was selected by only one of the parties, in this
case Sergeant Greer, does not negate an agency relationship. If the declarant
knowingly and willingly uses the services of an interpreter selected by another,
the interpreter is ‘deemed to act for both parties, and the statements made by the
[declarant] consequently [become] original evidence the same as if the [declarant]
had himself first selected the interpreter.’ In sum, one must look to the totality of
the circumstances, e.g., whether the declarant understood the interpreter’s role,
and whether the declarant freely spoke through the interpreter (People v. Torres
1989: 7).
The appellate court took note of the fact that the defendant had been informed
that a police officer would serve as the translator and made no objection to
Officer Wagner acting in that capacity. Nor did the defendant, at the time of
his appeal, question Wagner’s qualifications as an interpreter, or the accuracy of
his interpretations. The court added that Wagner testified under oath as to his
qualifications, and to the accuracy of his interpretations at the police interview.
One has to wonder, however, whether an indigent, non-native English speaker
being held in jail in connection with a homicide is in any position to reject the
interpreting assistance of a police officer. For example, in the case of Torres,
since there was no lawyer present, what real alternative did Torres have? Can
we call this an “agency relationship”? One could certainly say that in the case
of a defendant hiring his own interpreter to speak for him and render questions
into his mother tongue for him that this would more evidently seem to be an
“agency relationship”. But to call the situation of the average poor immigrant in
the hands of two police officers one of “free choice”, and to consider the police
officer/interpreter his “agent”, is to stretch one’s credulity. The California Court
of Appeal upheld Torres’ conviction.
In the numerous cases involving police officers as interpreters, some situ-
ations seem inherently susceptible to unprofessional interpreting, specifically
the influence of bias. One such situation is that of the undercover detective who
ends up translating covertly taped conversations between himself and the de-
fendant. This type of police work is common to cases involving the criminal
sale of a controlled substance (i.e., narcotic drugs). Cases in point are People
v. Lanfronco (1991) and People v. Brown (1998). Brown, convicted of selling
cocaine to an undercover police officer in his home, objected to the admission
into evidence of a transcript based on an audio-tape of the drug deal, since it was
the police officer himself who transcribed the tape and interpreted the Spanish
language used on the tape. The appeals court upheld the conviction. Similarly,
in the case of Peña v. State (1983), the defendant, after being convicted for the
crimes of conspiracy to commit a felony and dealing in stolen property, ap-
pealed on the ground that the detective who had made an audio-recording of his
(the defendant’s) statement was the one who translated the tape and prepared
the transcripts. The transcripts, in turn, were later read to the jury during his
trial. Moreover, the same detective testified to the accuracy of the transcripts at
the trial. The contention of the defendant was rejected by the appellate court,
which argued that the detective had been available for cross-examination at the
trial, and therefore the defendant indeed had had his right to confront witnesses
against him.
Questioning the accuracy of transcripts produced by police officers acting
in the capacity of interpreters and subsequently translators is not uncommon.
While some have been mentioned already in the context of other interpreting
issues, there are others still (e.g., People v. Barajas (1978)). The very act of
admitting into trial evidence a written confession that has been transcribed by a
bilingual police officer is sufficient grounds for some defendants to appeal their
conviction (e.g., People v. Ventura (1998)).
In contrast to appeals that are based on the use of police interpreters or trans-
lators is Yanis v. McGuire (1983), which deals with a law enforcement officer
who seemed to have the qualifications for work as an interpreter, but who chose
not to serve in that capacity. Yanis, a New York City police officer, was found
guilty of refusing to report to the detective room of the police station where he
worked, to aid in a homicide investigation by interpreting the interview with
a Spanish-speaking witness. He not only failed to show up, but he also failed
to notify his superior officer that he had not done so. Yanis was refusing to
act as an interpreter because he was not being compensated monetarily for this
“special skill.” In addition, he felt unqualified for the job. A postscript to this
counterpoint is the recent movement among some municipal governments in the
U.S.A. to establish differential pay scales for persons with exactly such special
skills. The police department in the city of Omaha, Nebraska, for example, in an
effort to satisfy the needs of an ever-growing Hispanic population, in the mid-
1990s initiated a program in “Spanish survival skills for police officers”, training
monolingual English-speaking police officers in a level of Spanish proficiency
that it deems sufficient for dealing with routine, low-level infractions such as
traffic violations. It also considered a certification program in Spanish interpret-
ing for bilingual police officers. Newspaper and journal articles have appeared
referring to similar efforts being made in Chicago, Illinois and Phoenix, Ari-
zona, efforts arising from the need in such cities for Spanish-speaking police
officers, and the desire of such officers to be given compensation for their special
skills. The implementation of pay scales for bilingual skills thus might serve to
institutionalize the practice of assigning interpreting duties to police officers.
3.2. The use of non-police personnel as ad hoc interpreters
Thus far this chapter has focused on interpreting and translating inside the
police station by police personnel. However, when police officers are sent out
to investigate the reporting of a crime, it is not always, or even usually, the
case that the officers who are charged with carrying out the investigation speak
the language of a non-English or limited-English-speaking witness or suspect.
The likelihood of a police officer speaking a language less commonly spoken
than Spanish is especially slim. Therefore, of necessity, the police have to rely
on the presence of bilingual persons in the immediate vicinity of the area of
investigation who can serve as spur-of-the-moment interpreters. These on-the-
spot interpreters may even be asked to accompany a witness or suspect to the

police station if the language of the latter is not spoken by anyone employed at
the police precinct, and if the precinct has no policy of employing professional
interpreters through either commercial agencies or a nearby courthouse.
When bilingual police officers are not available at police stations, sometimes
bilingual employees who are not police officers themselves are called in to
serve as interpreters. A case in point is Alzate v. State (1985). Convicted and
sentenced for trafficking in cocaine, the defendant appealed the conviction on the
grounds that his consent to being searched had not been voluntary. The appellate
court mentions that a Spanish-speaking employee, who was not a police officer,
was asked by the officers to serve as interpreter for the detainee. While Alzate
remembered her reading the Miranda warnings to him, he could not remember
if anyone told him, or told her to tell him, that he did not have to sign the waiver
of the rights consent form – written in Spanish – which he signed.
Probably the most frequently used ad hoc interpreters are relatives of the
person being questioned. This is so for the obvious reason that if the crime took
place in or around the perpetrator’s or victim’s house, there may very well be
relatives of that person present when the police arrive. Relatives who end up
being ad hoc interpreters very often are children. In one case (In re Carlos P.
1998), a thirteen-year old burglary suspect ended up being interpreter for himself
as well as for his grandmother. In this particular case, the detective in charge
of questioning the suspect did not bother to seek the services of an interpreter,
not even those of a fellow police officer or other precinct employee. Instead, he
asked the boy to interpret the Miranda rights to himself and to his grandmother,
his legal guardian. The request by the police officer that the boy act as interpreter
for his grandmother results from laws stipulating that if a suspect or detainee is
a minor, then his or her guardian must also be explained the Miranda rights, so
that the guardian can give the child assistance. The absurdity of delegating to
a suspect the duty of serving as interpreter for himself, not to mention for his
guardian, was not lost on the appellate judges. The opinion of Judge John M.
Hunt (In re Carlos P. 1998: 4) was as follows:
When the detective relied on the respondent to translate his own Miranda warnings
into Spanish, the detective delegated to the respondent a function that properly
belonged to the police. The detective could not relieve himself of this responsi-
bility since he could not know and did not testify that the respondent correctly
translated any or all of the warnings for his grandmother. Moreover, given the
respondent’s age, the officer could not assume that he so understood and appre-
ciated the nature of his constitutional rights that he could interpret and explain
them correctly.
In another case involving children as interpreters for the police (People v. Mar-
rero 1976), the son of a man convicted of first degree robbery served as inter-
preter for his father both at the time of the arrest and at the police station.
The use of children as interpreters has its precedents in non-legal community
interpreting. In fact, scholars specializing in interpreting/translating have been
studying the process by which children become “natural translators” (Bullock
and Harris 1997; Harris 1978; Müller 1989; Valdés et al. 1999). These scholars
see in child interpreters the seeds of professional interpreters/translators.
Various other sorts of relatives, beyond offspring, have been used by the
police as ad hoc interpreters. In a case involving a Serbo-Croatian who was
convicted of first-degree manslaughter (People v. Jordan 1985), the police used
the detainee’s brother to interpret the Miranda rights to him. The Supreme Court
of New York upheld the conviction. In a case dealing with sexual battery against
a child (Bauta v. State 1997), the child’s mother acted as interpreter for the
police officer who questioned her child. In an ironic choice of family member
as interpreter, police appointed the victim of a burglary to be the interpreter
for the detainee, who also happened to be his brother (People v. Kourani 1998).
Since the language of the detainee was Arabic, finding a more impartial available
interpreter may have been problematic for the police. Other family members
called in to be interpreters have included an uncle by marriage (Chao v. State
1985), and, in a rape case, the detainee’s uncle (People v. Prahl 1986).
Non-family members are recruited by the police to serve as momentary
interpreters because they happen to be around when the police arrive and they
speak the language of either the victim, the witness, or the suspect, depending
upon the circumstances. Thus, the following sorts of persons have been used as
interpreters by the police: the employer of the victim of a robbery (People v.
Feliciano 1989); a Thai-speaking store owner whose wife, the manager of the
store, was murdered and whose employee in the store was also murdered in the
same incident (People v. Siripongs 1988); a migrant farm worker who happened
to be riding in the car of another migrant farm worker who subsequently was
convicted of second-degree murder (LaSalle v. State 1966); a Chinese-American
businessman who served as an interpreter in a vehicular manslaughter case in
which the defendant was a personal acquaintance of his (People v. Duck Wong
1976); a Russian-speaking doctor working in the psychiatric ward of a hospital,
who was claimed by the defendant not to have sufficient command of Russian
and to have failed to administer the Miranda warnings (the defendant, accused
of murdering his mother, obtained a reversal of his conviction and a new trial
was ordered for him (People v. Turkenich 1988). In the case of a nine-month
old baby’s drowning death in a bathtub, the baby’s mother was questioned by
the police with the aid of a Spanish-speaking hospital social worker and a child
welfare agency caseworker (People v. Torres 1995).
In some of the more dubious choices of interpreter, the detainee’s girlfriend
was asked to interpret for him (People v. Santos-Sosa 1996); in two cases con-
fidential informants working with undercover agents served as interpreters for
the detainees (People v. Ali (Chaudry) 1993 and People v. Romero 1991); in
another case a confederate of the suspect involved in the illegal sale of cocaine,
while still in the home of the suspect, was asked by an undercover police of-
ficer to interpret for him and a confidential informant (Herrera v. State 1988).
In another case, a fellow prison inmate of a defendant convicted of multiple
murder, on occasion served as an interpreter for the conversations between the
defendant and police officers (Maqueira v. State 1991). Finally, in what turned
out to be an ironic choice of interpreter by the police, a person who was asked
by a police officer to assist him as a possible interpreter at the scene of the arrest
of a suspect, turned out to be in possession of a package containing twenty-
one packets of cocaine, which he immediately threw to the ground, and upon
which the man was arrested. So, the ad hoc interpreter turned out to be a de-
tainee, and subsequently a convicted defendant (People v. Villa, a.k.a. Mocada
1989).
3.2.1. Quality checking on ad hoc interpreters

Defense attorneys and trial judges occasionally check on the quality of the in-
terpreting or translating that was performed in the course of police work, when
the interpreters or translators in question had no professional qualifications for
the role. This usually happens at the time of the trial. This is an excellent prac-
tice, and should help to remedy the sorts of problematic interpreting situations
reviewed above. Evidence of the existence of such quality checking is found in
the following cases: Herrera v. State (1988), People v. Ledesma (1988), People
v. Márquez (1992), People v. Ali (1993), and Peña v. State (1983).

In the case of Herrera v. State (1988), the ad hoc interpreter whose interpre-
tations were checked – a man by the name of Alberto Arce – was a confederate
of the defendant, Orlando Herrera. The two of them, plus another man, were
in the process of selling cocaine to an undercover police officer when they
were arrested. The police officer did not speak Spanish, the language in which
the three co-defendants were conducting their business transaction. Arce, being
bilingual, acted as interpreter for the undercover detective, who was covertly
tape-recording everything that was being said. At the trial, a court interpreter
was asked to interpret the statements that Herrera had made in Spanish during
the drug deal, as a check on Arce’s interpreting ability. The court interpreter’s
rendition corroborated Arce’s interpretations, which was welcome news for the
prosecution but not for the defense.
In a similar case involving the illegal sale and possession of narcotic drugs,
People v. Ali (1993), undercover agents tape-recorded conversations in English,
Urdu and Punjabi, between the defendant and themselves during a heroin sale.
The confidential informant who served as a go-between in the transaction later
translated portions of the transcription of the tape, as he was a native speaker
of Urdu and also understood Punjabi. The defense attorney stipulated at the
trial as to the accuracy of the confidential informant’s translation, but it is not
clear from the appellate judgment on what basis he was able to do so. One
would have to assume that some sort of independent checking procedure had
been utilized, before the attorney could make such a stipulation. Certainly in the
undercover heroin sting operation that was at the heart of People v. Lanfronco
(1991) there was some sort of quality check on the undercover police detective’s
translations of tape-recorded dialogue between the defendant, the defendant’s
confederates and himself, because a “language expert” was brought to the trial
by the prosecution to testify regarding the accuracy of the police officer’s trans-
lations. Interestingly, the defense objected to the failure of the prosecution to
play the tape-recordings to the jury with the aid of simultaneous interpreting by
a court interpreter. Nevertheless, the trial court ruled that the transcripts of the
tapes were admissible, and that playing the tape in court was not necessary.
Sometimes, however, a trial court will indeed order a court-appointed inter-
preter to interpret for a jury portions of a tape-recorded police interrogation that
have been previously translated and admitted into evidence. And even if dis-
crepancies are uncovered in the process, they may not necessarily be considered
to be prejudicial to the appellant. In a case of murder by stabbing (People v.
Ledesma 1988), for instance, the appellate court ruled that whatever discrepan-
cies appeared between the translation and the subsequent in-court interpretation
were “either unrelated to the stabbing or inconsequential,” and that therefore,
“No prejudice to appellant resulted from any initial error in translation” (People
v. Ledesma 1988: 10).
Translations of the Miranda warnings, even if they are written out on the
back of a printed card, can also become subject to trial court scrutiny for a
determination of their accuracy. As mentioned previously in the discussion on
People v. Márquez (1992), at the trial of Gonzalo Márquez Márquez a court
interpreter evaluated the Spanish language translation of the Miranda rights that
had been read to the defendant, and found some of the words confusing.
Although they constitute only ten percent of the corpus, the cases referred
to above provide evidence of an element of caution in the manner in which
some lawyers and trial judges accept the interpreted or translated statements
of defendants who have been forced to rely on the services of ad hoc inter-
preters/translators while they were in police custody. Thus, it appears that the
use of such interpreters/translators has been questioned not only by appellate
courts, but by trial courts as well.
4. Conclusions
The appellate evidence that has been presented here leads to the conclusion that
interpreters used by the police at the scene of a crime or even in the police station
are a highly heterogeneous lot. Yet, no matter who the interpreter is during the
interrogation of a detainee in a police station, the product of such interrogations,
namely, a transcript of what was asked and what was answered, can be used as
evidence at a trial. It remains an open question as to whether lawyers and judges,
in reading such transcripts, are aware that a chain of interpreters/translators may
have been at work in any given case in which a police agency has utilized such
assistance in its investigation. Furthermore, if they are aware of the multiple
instances of interpreting and translating that have been employed along the
way, do they stop and question whether or not all of the links in the chain were
professionals in this field? Colin and Morris (1996: 23), who in addition to being
analytical observers are themselves professional legal interpreters, warn that,
“Engaging unskilled people to provide interpreting services means building a
weak link into the legal process”.
While in some cases professional interpreters/translators may be at work
at certain points in a police investigation,7 in other cases, as this appellate re-
view has shown, interpreters may have been selected for the job on the spur of
the moment, having had no prior training. In effect, in any given instance of
police work, community interpreters, bilingual police officers, and legal inter-
preters may have played a role. The product of their performance may in turn
become subject to the scrutiny of court-appointed interpreters, who – from the

perspective of certification and other sorts of qualifications – themselves are a
heterogeneous group in U.S. state courts. As this review has shown, at issue is
not merely the capability of the individual for interpreting through his or her
possession of a highly sophisticated, cognitively complex set of skills, but also
the confidence of both the legal system and the accused in this person’s willing-
ness to uphold the ethical guidelines of the profession, particularly neutrality
and lack of bias toward the people whose speech s/he is either interpreting or
translating. It is especially with respect to the Miranda rights that such neutrality
frequently has been questioned. In the case of interpreting the Miranda rights,
or in Britain, its equivalent – the ‘caution’ – even when the interpreter is a highly
Conclusions 37
competent professional and has no conflict of interest with respect to the person
who is being questioned, problems can emerge. As Russell (2000) convincingly
shows, depending upon the manner in which a police officer states and explains
the caution, its rendition in the target language by a trained, impartial interpreter
will be smooth, or alternatively, disfluent and inaccurate. The successful rendi-
tions of an interpreter depend not only on his or her own competence, but on the
verbal behavior of the person for whom s/he is interpreting. As always, it takes
two to tango.
This overview has demonstrated that defense attorneys are becoming more
aware of the issues raised by the use of non-professional interpreters/translators
in the course of policework. From the perspective of social policy, what is called
for is a more extensive utilization of professionals in this very sensitive phase
of the administration of justice and the education of judges in this regard.
Chapter 3
The Miranda warnings and linguistic coercion:
the role of footing in the interrogation of
a limited-English-speaking murder suspect
The previous chapter has reviewed appellate cases involving the use of inter-
preters by the police. In this chapter I examine a specific case, one in which the
police can be considered to have used linguistic coercion on a Limited-English
speaking murder suspect. I will show how the right against self-incrimination
was systematically denied the suspect, and reveal the ambiguous role played by
a police officer designated as ‘interpreter’ for the interview. In addition, I will
show why this speech event was in fact an ‘interrogation’ and not an ‘interview,’
and that the police officer assigned the task of interpreting for the interrogat-
ing police detective and the detainee moved half-heartedly into this interpreter
‘footing,’ and kept sliding back into police detective mode.8 I will demonstrate
that the police detective/interpreter used the dual role to his advantage, to give
himself extra leverage in manipulating the detainee into producing a confession
to the crimes with which he was charged.
If linguistic coercion implies one speaker exercising power over another, then
perhaps nowhere does linguistic coercion have a potentially more consequential
impact on an interlocutor than in legal settings. Since the locus of linguistic
power in legal speech situations often resides in the right to ask questions and
the concomitant right to expect answers, it is no wonder that in the courtroom
lawyers have an exceptionally large measure of control over the testimony of
witnesses and defendants. Some of this control derives from question form
(Berk-Seligson 1999a; Danet and Kermish 1978; Danet, Hoffman, Kermish,
Rafn and Stayman 1980; Rigney 1999; Woodbury 1984). Attorney control over
witness answers comes also from the sequencing of questions in the chain of
question/answer adjacency pairs (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Dunstan 1980) and
from the repetition of questions (Atkinson and Drew 1979; Matoesian 2001).
Attorneys are not the only ones who exercise control over witness or defendant
answers; judges also hold this type of power, as Philips (1998) demonstrates in
her analysis of change of plea hearings, and Conley and O’Barr (1990) show in
the more informal setting of litigation court.
If the courtroom proper and more informal courtroom-like settings are co-
ercive contexts for those who are placed in the position of answering questions,
then the speech situation of the police interview or police interrogation is almost
The Miranda Rights 39
certainly more coercive from the perspective of asymmetrical power relation-

ships, since (1) there is no judge present to control the interrogators’ behavior
and (2) a lack of cooperation with the police can be a cause for concern on
the part of the person who is being questioned in terms of their physical safety.
Those in custody fear the potential of abuse from the questioner. It is not by
chance that interrogation manuals written by the police for police interrogators
specifically advise them not to handcuff or shackle the suspect during the inter-
rogation (Inbau, Reid and Buckley 1986: 40; Van Meter and Bopp 1973: 41),
or be armed in the interrogation room (Inbau et al. 1986: 41), or “deny him the
human comforts he is entitled to,” i.e., the right “to use the bathroom occasion-
ally, eat at regular times, drink water occasionally . . . ” (Van Meter and Bopp
1973: 51). Such manuals go out of their way to make these points because, as
they themselves acknowledge, police brutality toward detainees has been com-
mon in the past and continues to exist in the present. In recent years, several
high-profile cases of police brutality at the time of arrest, all of them involv-
ing African-American, Afro-Caribbean or African detainees, have reached trial
courts in the U.S.A. – Rodney King in Los Angeles, and Abner Louima in New
York City, being perhaps the most widely known.9
1. The Miranda Rights
In this chapter I examine the process of linguistic coercion by the police, and
demonstrate how it affected the outcome of a case involving a Limited-English
speaking murder suspect. I also show how the right against self-incrimination
was systematically denied the suspect, and reveal the ambiguous role played by a
police officer designated as ‘interpreter’for the interview. In addition, I will show
why this speech event was in fact an ‘interrogation’ and not an ‘interview,’ and
that the police officer assigned the task of interpreting for the interrogating police
detective and the detainee moved half-heartedly into this interpreter ‘footing,’
and kept sliding back into police detective mode. I will demonstrate that the
police detective/interpreter used the dual role to his advantage, to give himself
extra leverage in manipulating the detainee into producing a confession to the
crimes with which he was charged.
In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the case of Miranda v. Arizona
that before interrogating suspects, the police were required to warn them of
their constitutional rights. Specifically, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitu-
tion provides, that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a
witness against himself.” In addition, the Sixth Amendment provides that “in all
criminal prosecutions, the accused . . . shall have the assistance of counsel for
40 The Miranda warnings and linguistic coercion
the defense.” Thus a suspect must be warned (1) that he has a right to remain
silent, and that he need not answer any questions; (2) that if he does answer
questions, his answers can be used as evidence against him; (3) that he has the
right to consult with a lawyer before or during the questioning of him by the
police; and (4) that if he cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be provided for
him without cost to him. Furthermore, according to Miranda, “. . . if the suspect
indicates, at any time or in any manner whatsoever, that he does not want to talk,
the interrogation must cease. The interrogator is not privileged to ‘talk him out
of’ his refusal to talk” (Inbau, Reid and Buckley 1986: 220).
Police officers carry plastic cards with the Miranda warnings printed on
them. Typically, the cards list the warnings in the following manner:
1. You have the right to remain silent.
2. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.
3. You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have him present with you while
you are being questioned.
4. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you
before any questioning, if you wish.
5. You can decide at any time to exercise these rights and not answer any
questions or make any statements.
Inbau et al. (1986: 222) point out that the Supreme Court did not specify that
the fifth warning had to be read aloud to the suspect, merely that the police
had to honor the wishes of the suspect, if he changed his mind about answering
their questions during an interrogation. And to proceed with an interrogation
required that the suspect “waive” his Miranda rights. A waiver is some sort of
verbal statement by the suspect to the effect that he is willing to answer the
questions of the police. Furthermore, the police have to be assured that suspects
“knowingly and intelligently waive those rights and agree to answer questions
or make a statement.” Their method of obtaining such assurances is by asking
a question such as, “Do you understand each of these rights?” This is normally
done immediately after the reading of the warnings.
Police officers do not necessarily have to read the Miranda rights from a
printed card.They are permitted to paraphrase them.The danger here, as Cotterill
(2000) has recently shown in her analysis of the ‘police caution’, the United
Kingdom’s equivalent of the Miranda warnings, is that there is great variability
in the way that different police officers paraphrase the warnings, and that in the
process of paraphrasing, the police often make the warnings less comprehensible
than they are in the printed version that appears on the ‘caution card’. Shuy
(1998: 53) demonstrates that even when the police read directly from the card,
their performance as readers is often so poor, that comprehension of the Miranda
warnings is adversely affected. Shuy (1998: 55) further points out that even if the
Miranda warnings are read well, “their sequencing has a strange illogicality”,
so that persons being read their rights do not realize that the first decision that
they have to make is whether to ask for a lawyer, and that the decision to speak
or remain silent should be made after that decision, rather than before.
As a result of factors such as the ones identified by Shuy and Cotterill, the
issue of the comprehensibility of warnings such as Miranda or the U.K. caution
is a serious one. In the U.S.A., as opposed to the U.K., there is no standardized
written version of the Miranda warnings. Every jurisdiction has the right to use
the wording it chooses. Thus, according to Rogers et al. (2007: 179), there are
at least thirty-one different versions of Miranda warnings used by state police
(Helms 2003) and sixteen different versions used at the county level in New Jer-
sey alone (Greenfield et al. 2001). The empirical study of Rogers et al. (2007: 1),
which analyzes 560 Miranda warnings used across the U.S.A., finds that their
“wording and sentence complexity vary dramatically from jurisdiction to juris-
diction”, and while some of them require only a 2.8 grade level of education
to be able to understand them, others would require a post-graduate education.
Thus, lack of standardization is an important factor in accounting for the varying
degrees of comprehensibility of the Miranda warnings. Nevertheless, standard-
ization of such types of warnings has not solved this problem, as one study of
the U.K. caution demonstrates. The research of Shepherd et al. (1995: 1) finds
that of 109 people who were asked to listen to the police caution, on average
about half of it made sense to them: “About one in four actually understood
the first element, one in eight the second, and one in three the third.” Perhaps
most disturbing is the finding that over half of the people who participated in
the study considered the caution to be pressuring or a threat.
Comprehensibility is just one of many linguistic issues that need to be con-
sidered when one examines the Miranda warnings, as Shuy (1997) notes. Other
problematic aspects of the Miranda warnings, according to Shuy (1997), are as
follows. First, coercion of a suspect can come in the form of verbal dominance
or control:
Intimidation can result both from physical force and from verbal force. If suspects
are dominated by verbal force without regard for their individual desire or volition,
the result is coercion as much as it would be from physical force. (Shuy 1997: 179)
Van Meter and Bopp (1973: 50) concur, advising police interrogators to refrain
from using “duress”. They define duress as a “state of mind,” or “emotional
strain,” or “emotion distress”. They warn that, “Anything the interrogator says
or does which affects or influences the mind of the suspect to the degree that
he is beyond his own choice of complying or denying, can be construed to be
duress”, and that if duress was considered to have been used, it would vitiate the
suspect’s confession because the courts would consider it to be unreliable (Van
Meter and Bopp 1973: 50).
A second problematic issue related to the Miranda Rights is that detainees
may not fully understand what it means “to have an attorney present”. Often
they think of other authority figures that they would like present to help them,
and call for their mother, their priest, or their parole officer instead (Shuy 1997:
185–186).
A third reason why the comprehensibility of Miranda rights cannot be taken
for granted is that it is not clear what “remain silent” means. It can be construed
as saying absolutely nothing, or saying nothing substantive about the alleged
crime, or even engaging in small talk (Shuy 1997: 188). Finally, it is not clear
when the police are justified in concluding that a suspect has changed his/her
mind about their willingness to talk to the police again, if they have previously
indicated that they choose to remain silent (Shuy 1997: 194).
Despite the fact that the Miranda rights have been in place and have been rou-
tinely read to suspects since 1966,10 seasoned trial lawyers comment that they do
not have the intended effect, since many suspects tend to ignore them. A lawyer
who at one time served as inspector general of the U.S. Justice Department
in the 1990s says that, “Even with the Miranda safeguards, criminal suspects
still make incriminating statements and confess to crimes with surprising fre-
quency” (Bromwich 1999). Statistics support this surprising generalization: it
is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of suspects waive their Miranda rights and
talk to the police (Greenhouse 2000). Unfortunately, many of those who are
considered to have waived their rights in fact tried to claim them, but to no
avail – their efforts to obtain a lawyer and to remain silent until counsel ap-
peared were ignored by the police (Ainsworth 2008). Even more disturbing is
the frequency with which appellate courts turn down the appeals of defendants
who post-conviction argue that they had tried to invoke their Miranda rights, but
that the interrogating police officers disregarded their efforts to do so.

A striking example of the failure of the justice system to support defendants’
efforts to invoke one of their Miranda rights, namely the right to have a lawyer
present at their interrogation, is the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Robert L.
Davis, Petitioner v. United States (1994). The issue brought before the Supreme
Court was whether the defendant had clearly invoked his right to an attorney. The
military trial record shows that about an hour and a half into the interrogation
by the Naval Investigative Service, which was holding the defendant on suspi-
cion of murder, the defendant said, “Maybe I should talk to a lawyer.” After a
short break and another hour of questioning, Davis said, “I think I want a lawyer
before I say anything else.” The military trial court sentenced Davis to “con-
finement for life, a dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances,
and a reduction in rank to the lowest pay grade” (Davis v. U.S., 512 U.S. 452,
page 2). On appeal, a Navy Marine Corps Court of Military Review upheld the
conviction, rejecting Davis’s contention that he had been denied the right to a
lawyer at his interrogation. So, too, did the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Sandra
Day O’Connor, writing for the Court, gave the following arguments in support
of the ruling.
Justice O’Connor explained that the U.S. Court of Military Appeals was
aware that three different approaches had been developed by state and federal
courts to “a suspect’s ambiguous or equivocal request for counsel”:
Some jurisdictions have held that any mention of counsel, however ambiguous,
is sufficient to require that all questioning cease. Others have attempted to define
a threshold standard of clarity for invoking the right to counsel and have held that
comments falling short of the threshold do not invoke the right to counsel. Some
jurisdictions . . . have held that all interrogation about the offense must immedi-
ately cease whenever a suspect mentions counsel, but they allow interrogators to
ask narrow questions designed to clarify the earlier statement and the [suspect’s]
desires respecting counsel (36 M. J. 337 (1993) at 341).
The opinion of the Supreme Court was that, “if a suspect makes a reference to an
attorney that is ambiguous or equivocal in that a reasonable officer in light of the
circumstances would have understood only that the suspect might be invoking
the right to counsel, our precedents do not require the cessation of questioning.”
The Court’s position was that “the suspect must unambiguously request counsel”
(Davis v. US, 512 US 452 (1994), page 4). While a suspect does not have to
speak “with the discrimination of an Oxford don”, he must express his desire for
an attorney clearly enough that a “reasonable police officer in the circumstances
would understand the statement to be a request for an attorney” (Davis v. US,
512 US 452 (1994), page 4). Justice O’Connor admits that “requiring a clear
assertion of the right to counsel might disadvantage some suspects who – because
of fear, intimidation, lack of linguistic skills, or a variety of other reasons – will
not clearly articulate their right to counsel although they actually want to have a
lawyer present”; however, she adds, the Court needs to keep in mind “the other
side of the Miranda equation: the need for effective law enforcement” (Davis
v. US, page 5). Thus, the Court rejects phrases such as “I might want a lawyer”
as being actual requests for an attorney, and upholds the right of the police to
continue questioning a suspect who has used such a phrase.
Justice David H. Souter wrote the dissenting opinion on the decision. He
found that Miranda case law points in the direction of law enforcement officials
stopping their interrogation and asking a suspect to make his choice clear, when
they “reasonably do not know whether or not the suspect wants a lawyer” (Davis
v. US, 512 US 452 (1994), Souter, page 2). Justice Souter (page 2) displayed
a keen sensitivity to the plight of those who do not have high proficiency in
English:
. . . criminal suspects who may (in Miranda’s words) be “thrust into an unfamiliar
atmosphere and run through menacing police interrogation procedures” . . . would
seem an odd group to single out for the Court’s demand of heightened linguistic
care. A substantial percentage of them lack anything like a confident command of
the English language . . . many are “woefully ignorant” . . . ; and many more will
be sufficiently intimidated by the interrogation process or overwhelmed by the
uncertainty of their predicament that the ability to speak assertively will abandon
them.
Judge Souter, being sensitive to the needs of the “timid or verbally inept”, ex-
pressed the minority opinion that in cases where a suspect undergoing custodial
interrogation ambiguously states that he wants a lawyer to be summoned, the
interrogators should restrict their questions to verifying whether he indeed is
asking for a lawyer (Davis v. US, 512 US 452 (1994), Souter, page 6).
As a result of the variety of factors referred to above, many suspects confess
to crimes that they have not committed. This fact receives further confirmation
in an important work on the subject, Troubling Confessions, by Peter Brooks
(2000). Brooks adds to the voices of those who question the truth of many of
the confessions that are made by suspects in custody, despite the fact that these
suspects had been told their Miranda rights. As Brooks (2000: 31) explains,
The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been lenient in interpreting the
rules imposed on interrogators, so that many forms of trickery are permitted–
including lies about evidence inculpating the suspect, fake confessions by con-
federates – and statements made before the suspect is “Mirandized” are often
allowed on the grounds that the suspect was not yet subject to custodial interro-
gation . . . and even statements clearly taken in violation of Miranda rules may
lead to “fruits” that are admissible into evidence. Suspects continue to talk, to
give confessions (including some later discovered to be wholly false) because the
pressure to talk is too great to resist.
Shuy (1998: 15) concurs, explaining that one reason why so many suspects
confess to crimes, despite being given the Miranda warnings, is that “the laws
regarding police interrogation permit the police to lie, to flatter, to adduce, to
ask questions roughly, to play act, to trick, and to cajole.” One such law is the
1969 Supreme Court decision that gives tacit recognition to the necessity for
trickery and deceit during police interrogations (Yeschke 1997: 84).
A further factor weakens Miranda, Brooks argues: most people believe that to
remain silent in the face of questions by the police gives the impression of guilt.
Suspects therefore willingly enter into an interlocutionary relationship with the

police interrogator (Brooks 2000: 31). This relationship is a bond, an affective
bond instigated by the interrogator, which “contains, and activates, elements of
dependency, subjugation, fear, the desire for propitiation, the wish to appease
and to please” (Brooks 2000: 35).
If there is often an affective bond between interrogator and suspect it is not
there by chance. Police officers are trained to establish rapport with the person
they are interrogating, evidence of this being the advice to this effect that police
interrogation manuals offer. Aubry and Caputo (1980: 200), for example, rec-
ommend “the sympathetic approach” as “an excellent all-around approach” to
police interrogation. Inbau et al. (1986: 78) advise the sympathetic approach in
interrogating the emotional suspect, the individual who “has a strong sense of
moral guilt – in other words, a ‘troubled conscience”’; for such suspects, they
recommend the use of “expressions of understanding and compassion with re-
gard to the commission of the offense as well as the suspect’s present difficulty.”
Van Meter and Bopp (1973: 79) emphasize that before an interrogator begins to
discuss specific facts related to the crime, he should establish rapport with the
suspect, that is, “a harmonious or sympathetic relationship.” Yeschke (1997: 84)
recommends that the interrogator “empathize with and help the subject rational-
ize his or her participation and save face when talking about it.” It is revealing
that Yeschke, a former FBI agent not trained in linguistics, independently dis-
covered the theory of Brown and Levinson (1978) and its notion of positive face
wants.
Leo (2008: 124), who has studied over 2,000 felony cases involving police
interrogations and confessions, finds that American police have minimized the
impact of Miranda:
They have developed multiple strategies to avoid, circumvent, nullify, and some-
times violate Miranda and its invocation rules in their pursuit of confession evi-
dence. Because American police have learned to “work Miranda” to their advan-
tage (i.e., to issue the warnings in strategic ways that will result in legally accepted
waivers or to interrogate without the necessity of providing warnings), Miranda
has become a “manageable annoyance” – the anti-climax of custodial questioning
– to American police that once waived does not affect the subsequent interroga-
tion because it does not prohibit any post-waiver interrogation techniques, and
suspects rarely invoke their rights following the warnings.
Leo (2008) and Leo and White (1999) show how the police accomplish this. For
example, they recast the interrogation as a noncustodial interview, they construct
“implicit” waivers, deemphasize the significance of the Miranda warnings, and
persuade suspects to waive Miranda. Through mechanisms such as these, the
police talk suspects out of their Miranda rights.
2. Subversion of the Miranda rights of a limited-English

speaker
The case that is analyzed here deals with a suspect who tried to invoke his
Miranda rights, and did so repeatedly. On fourteen occasions during his first
interrogation by the police, the detainee expressed the desire not to talk about
the details of the crime for which he was being held in custody. As the transcripts
of the interrogation show, the police ignored his wishes, time and time again.
Most interestingly from the vantage point of those who study interpreting in
legal settings, the person assigned to interpret for him and for the interrogating
police detective, himself a police officer, was as guilty as the official interrogator,
if not more so, of violating the suspect’s Miranda rights. The case brings to light
a problem largely ignored by the courts, namely, that a police officer who is
taking on the role of interpreter may subvert that role, and use it to help seduce
a suspect into confessing to a crime he did not commit.
From a discourse analysis perspective, this paper will provide evidence to
show that in fact both police officers, including the one assigned the role of
interpreter, were engaged in the speech event of interrogation throughout the
course of their interaction with the suspect, despite his repeated statements
indicating that he wished not to talk about the topics that they brought up.
Noteworthy are the discourse aspects of the speech event that the appellate judges
chose to comment on, and the discourse features that they ignored. Particularly
interesting from a discourse perspective, is that the appellate court’s opinion
included the verbatim text of much of the interrogation, with the turns at talk
intact, rather than summarized.Thus, the speech behavior of the police detectives
was at the heart of the arguments made by the appeals judges in their decision
on the case.
3. The case: The People v. Alvarez

In 1996, in a large city, an eighteen-year old Mexican man was arrested by the
police and charged with first-degree murder and attempted rape. He had been
caught running away from the scene of the crime, a row of hedges dividing
a parking lot, where the semi-nude body of a young woman was found. The
defendant, Carlos Rivera Alvarez, convicted for her murder, is believed to have
begun “a stabbing frenzy” behind the hedge, according to Judge Russell (Court
of Appeal 19XX: 2), who wrote the opinion for the appellate court that was
considering the appeal of his conviction.
The case: The People v. Alvarez 47
According to Judge Russell, two police officers began interrogating Alvarez:

Officer Calhoun, a monolingual English speaker, and Officer Larson, a bilin-
gual English/Spanish speaker of European descent. Larson spoke Spanish with
a heavy English accent, and evidenced numerous grammatical and lexical de-
ficiencies in his ability to speak Spanish. As Judge Russell put it (Court of
Appeal 19XX: 2), “The format was that Officer Calhoun’s questions in English
were translated into Spanish by Officer Larson, who then translated defendant’s
answers into English for the record.” In other words, Larson was assigned the
role of interpreter. And that is exactly how Officer Calhoun introduced Officer
Larson to the suspect.
The interrogation began at 4:03 in the morning, and ended one and a half
hours later. However, it was split into two sessions: the first conducted by Officer
Calhoun, and the second led by Officer Larson, who was temporarily left alone
with the suspect, and who continued the interrogation. Judge Russell points out
that the defendant had not eaten anything on the evening of the murder, but had
drunk eight or nine beers.
After asking the suspect a number of questions required on their “booking
sheet”, such as his name (which he gave falsely), address, height, weight, un-
usual physical markings on his body, occupation, and so on, Calhoun asked
Larson to read the suspect his Miranda rights. Larson did so, in Spanish. Larson
also was careful to establish that the suspect had understood those rights, by
asking the suspect to explain to him what he thought each of the rights meant.
Alvarez paraphrased the rights, and afterwards signed a document stating that
he understood all of them.11 It is worth noting that Larson included in the list the
fifth right, the right to halt the interrogation at any moment after it had begun.
After the reading of the rights, Calhoun offered Alvarez another glass of wa-
ter, which the latter accepted. The first question asked by Calhoun was, “Luis,
can you tell us what happened tonight? Can you tell us what happened?” 12 To
this, the suspect replied, “No, no puedo” (‘No, I can’t’). Larson, rather than in-
terpreting the answer in English, pretended not to understand, saying “¿Cómo?”

(‘What?’), to which Carlos Alvarez reiterated his previous answer, “No puedo”
(‘I can’t’). Larson did not accept this as a final answer, challenging it with a
repetition of his reply, implying disbelief: “¿No puede?” (‘You can’t?’). Thus,
from the very outset, Larson began to put himself in a police detective footing,
aligning himself with Calhoun as part of the interrogating team. Repeatedly,
throughout the interrogation – either in the presence of Calhoun when officially
playing the role of interpreter, or when alone with the suspect – Larson simi-
larly challenged the answers of Alvarez, by using the mechanism of repeating
his answer, usually with a question intonation.
Even at Alvarez’s trial, the judge ruled that the defendant’s Miranda rights had
been violated because in spite of his repeated attempts to end the interrogation,
the police officers persisted in questioning him. The trial court judge determined
that Alvarez had invoked his right to remain silent after Officer Calhoun first
asked him about meeting a girl on the night of his arrest. The appellate court
agreed, and found the two police officers’“failure at the first interrogation session
to respect his invocation of his right to remain silent was sufficiently egregious
as to constitute a violation of due process and thus taint as involuntary the
confession made at the second interrogation session” (Court of Appeal 19XX:
9). What the defendant said at the first interrogation, a portion of which is
presented by the appellate court as evidence of the Miranda violation and is
reproduced below, was considered by the appellate judges to be “tantamount to a
confession”. In contrast, at the second interrogation session, which occurred just
a few hours after the first one and which the defendant voluntarily requested from
his jail cell, the defendant made a full confession. It is the fact that the defendant
kept trying to cut off questioning, to no avail, that led the appellate court to
conclude that the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege of not incriminating
himself had been denied him, and that therefore the incriminating statements he
made were a product of compulsion.
3.1. The linguistic achievement of coercion
How did Officers Calhoun and Larson successfully obtain a confession during
their first interrogation of him? It is worthwhile presenting the appellate court’s
view on how the interrogation was coercive. First of all, the interrogation se-
quence cited by the judges in their ruling constitutes strong evidence of the
coercive tactics of the police officers. While some specifics of the questioning
strategies are mentioned, it is primarily the repetition by the suspect of his desire
not to talk about the crime that the appellate court singles out. The judges do
note, however, that each time the defendant expressed this wish, “. . . the officers
ostensibly agreed to talk about other matters, but they soon resumed questioning
him about aspects of the incident. The officers’ conduct conveyed the unmistak-
able message that defendant’s rights were meaningless” (Court of Appeal 19XX:
15). The court characterized the police officers as therefore having a “callous
attitude” toward the defendant.
In addition to presenting the text of what for them was the most damaging
aspect of the interrogation, the appellate judges mentioned some of the ob-
jectionable points in the interrogation that immediately preceded that phase.
What follows are the portions of the defendant’s answers, which in their totality
inculpate him, as highlighted by Judge Russell (Court of Appeal 19XX: 3):
Asked by Officer Calhoun to “[e]xplain to me how you feel,” defendant answered:

“I feel badly. I feel . . . I feel that I am bad with myself.” Defendant acknowledged
that he had a “quite serious” problem, and that that problem was why the police
had stopped him. Defendant had never had “a problem like this before,” and
had never had problems with the police. After he got defendant to admit having
carried a large knife that night, Officer Calhoun asked: “I know you met a lady
tonight . . . True?” Defendant responded that “I feel bad answering the question.”
Officer Calhoun stated: “I can see the tears in your eyes. I know what happened
tonight made you very, very bad feeling. Okay, feel bad about that. I know it’s in
your mouth. What you want to tell me is right in your mouth. It just needs a little
pushing to get it out . . . But we take it a, a little at a time.”
What is it about these questions and answers that the appellate court found
objectionable and evidence of coercion? While the appellate judges did not
say it, it is clear from a look at police interrogation manuals that the police
officers are following tried and true interrogating strategies, yet some of them
are considered by the courts to be coercive.
First of all, police interrogators are advised not to refer to the crime itself at the
outset of an interrogation, but to call it the ‘business’ or ‘situation’ or ‘problem’
(Van Meter and Bopp 1973: 75, 87–88). The strategy is for the interrogator to
keep to him/herself the facts of the crime, withhold as much information from the
suspect as s/he can, so as to be able to obtain the version of the story provided by
the suspect and compare it with whatever is known by the interrogator to be true.
Officer Calhoun succeeds in getting Alvarez to admit that he was carrying a
lethal weapon on the night of the murder – a foot-long knife. He also appeals
to the suspect’s emotions. The suspect conforms to what Inbau et al. (1986:
77) refer to as ‘emotional offenders’. According to these professional interroga-
tors, an emotional offender is one “who ordinarily experiences a considerable
feeling of remorse, mental anguish, or compunction as a result of his offense.
This individual has a strong sense of moral guilt – in other words, a ‘troubled
conscience”’ (Inbau et al. 1986: 78). Calhoun capitalizes on the emotional state
of Alvarez, telling him he sees tears in his eyes, and agreeing with him that he
must feel bad. He also is cajoling him into confessing what he did.
Calhoun follows standard interrogation procedure in making the suspect
believe that he and Larson “pretty much know what happened” (page 43, lines
10–11); in other words, that they know the facts of the crime and Alvarez’s role
in it. When Alvarez insists that he does not want to talk about it, Calhoun, in
typical police interrogator fashion, refers to specific incriminating evidence that
he now has against him (finding the knife in the bushes, the presence of blood
on the knife, on the suspect’s shoes, and pants pocket), implying that it is no use
denying his actions in the crime, that he might as well confess since the police
have all the evidence they need (although at this point we do not know if the
police had in fact found the knife). He prefaces the list of damaging evidence
with a motive he has figured out for Alvarez: that he had wanted to hurt the
victim a little, had wanted to scare her (page 43, lines 18–19). While there is
no question that Officer Calhoun is conducting an interrogation, judging by the
tape-recording and its transcription, what is puzzling is the behavior of Officer
Larson, since he begins shifting into interrogator mode.
3.1.1. Coercion by the police interpreter

It is the thesis of this chapter that Officer Larson, in serving as interpreter for
Officer Calhoun and the suspect, never saw himself as primarily or even secon-
darily an “interpreter”. And neither did Calhoun consider him fundamentally to
be an interpreter at the interrogation. Nor did the appellate court. Throughout
the appellate opinion, Judge Russell refers to Larson as a “police officer”. In his
only reference to Larson’s role as interpreter he mentions it merely to establish
the contextual background of the interrogation, saying, “At 4:03 a.m., Officers
Calhoun and Larson began interrogating defendant. Officer Calhoun did most
of the questioning. The format was that Officer Calhoun’s questions in English
were translated into Spanish by Officer Larson, who then translated defendant’s
answers into English for the record” (Court of Appeal 19XX: 2). Nevertheless,
the court reporting service that typed the transcript of the interrogation desig-
nates the officers as “Sergeant Calhoun: Interrogator” and “Detective Larson:
Interpreter”. Furthermore, the title that appears on the cover page of the tran-
script is “Interview with Carlos Alvarez aka Luis Gonzales,” indicating that the
trial court had classified the speech event as an “interview” rather than an in-
terrogation. Despite this, all references to the questioning of the defendant by
Calhoun and Larson in the appellate court’s judgment are to the two “interroga-
tion sessions” that they had led. Thus, while the first questioning of the suspect
should have been merely an interview, it was in reality an interrogation.

Shuy (1998) makes a set of very useful distinctions between the language
of the police interview and that of the police interrogation. In general, what
distinguishes the two is that “Interviewers make use of less of their power than
do interrogators. An interview probes but does not cross-examine. It inquires
but does not challenge. It suggests rather than demands. It uncovers rather than
traps. It guides but does not dominate” (Shuy 1998: 12). Interrogators, in con-
trast, “challenge, warn, accuse, deny, and complain. They are more direct. They
demand and they dominate” (Shuy 1998: 13).
Larson was supposed to be the “interpreter” in the interrogation of Alvarez.
However, he behaved as an interrogator, performing interpreting services in a
faulty and half-hearted way, for the most part helping Calhoun carry out his part
in the interrogation. As will be demonstrated below, Larson’s unwillingness to
remain in the ‘footing’ of interpreter is evidenced in three ways: (1) he aligns
himself with Calhoun as a co-interrogator, making references to both of them
in his interpretations of Calhoun’s questions, when in fact Calhoun refers only
to himself; (2) he behaves in classic interrogator mode when left alone with
the suspect; (3) he fails to interpret many of the questions and statements of
Calhoun, and the responses of Alvarez, thereby violating the basic norms of
legal interpreting.
3.1.2. Footing as co-interrogator

Upon interpreting the questions and statements of Calhoun, Larson often inac-
curately interprets the latter’s use of first-person singular reference, rendering
it in Spanish as first-person plural. As can be seen in the Extracts 1–5 below,
Larson’s rendition of Calhoun’s utterances refers to the two of them, even though
Calhoun is speaking only for himself. Specifically, Larson changes Calhoun’s
first-person subject and object pronouns from singular to plural, with corre-
sponding morphological changes in the verbs. This indicates that Larson is not
satisfied with simply being an interpreter in this event; he wants to be a member
of an interrogating team.
In Extract 1, below, Calhoun is trying to establish certain facts concerning
the whereabouts of Alvarez on the evening of the murder and his activities that
night. The suspect has just told him that he spent the previous night sleeping
outdoors, in the corridors of an apartment complex. The words highlighted in
bold print represent the discrepancies between source language and target lan-
guage first-person pronouns. No other interpreting discrepancies are noted here,
even though they abound. The English rendition of Larson’s Spanish utterances
are those of the official court interpreter.
Extract 1
1 Calhoun: In the walkways? Okay. Ahh, you told . . . you said . . . you told me you had some
2 beer today. What else did you do . . . today? Did you just walk around town? What
3 did you do?
4 Larson: Usted dice . . . usted dice, nos dice que estaba tomando cerveza hoy dı́a. ¿Qué más
5 hizo hoy dı́a?
6 ‘You say . . . you say, you tell us that you were drinking beer today. What else did
7 you do today?’
In Extract 2, Calhoun is trying to get Alvarez to tell him why he feels bad about
himself. He is playing on the suspect’s sense of guilt and remorse, trying to bring
him to the point of admitting his guilt in the murder.
Extract 2
1 Calhoun: Explain to me how you feel.
2 Larson: Dı́ganos cómo se (u)13
3 ‘Tell us how you (u)’
At a key point in the interrogation, Calhoun is cajoling the suspect to narrate

“what happened” on the evening of the murder. He had opened the questioning
with the same vaguely worded probe, but without allusions to Alvarez’s courage.
Now, however, he has the suspect in a highly emotional state, having just admitted
that he had “never done this before”, although still not specifying what he had
done.
Extract 3
1 Calhoun: Okay, I know it will take a lot of courage, but can you tell me what happened?
2 Larson: Dice que sabe que tomará bastante coraje pero ¿nos puede decir qué pasó esta
3 noche?
4 ‘He says he knows it will take a lot of courage, but can you tell us what happened
5 tonight?’
6
In another pivotal moment of the interrogation, Calhoun wantsAlvarez to believe

that he knows that Alvarez had met the murder victim that night. In Extract 4,
he makes one of the most sensitive, and specific statements thus far in the
interrogation: he links the suspect to the murder victim.
Extract 4
1 Calhoun: Now I . . . I know you met a lady tonight. A young lady tonight.
2 Larson: Sabemos que conoció a una muchacha esta noche.
3 ‘We know that you met a girl tonight.’
One of the most striking pieces of linguistic evidence indicating that Larson
considers himself to be a police detective/interrogator, rather than an ad hoc

interpreter, is the language he uses in administering Alvarez the Miranda rights.
His repeated use of the first-person plural pronoun, ‘we’ and ‘ us,’ and an even
more explicit reference to the suspect’s willingness to talk ‘to me and with this
detective’ are indicative of his view of himself, his footing, vis à vis the suspect.
Extract 5
1 Larson: Okay, el número dos por atrás dice, “Conociendo perfectamente sus derechos,
2 desea usted hablar conmigo y con este detective aquı́ ahora o hacer alguna
3 declaración?
4 ‘Okay, number two on the back says, “Knowing your rights perfectly, do you
5 wish to talk to me and with this detective here now or to make some statement?”’
6 González: Sı́.
7 ‘Yes.’
8 Larson: Okay. Si desea hablar con nosotros, ponga la palabra “sı́” y también
9 necesitamos que firme su nombre aquı́ donde dice: “signature of defendant”. Y
10 firma aquı́. . . .
11 Okay. ‘If you wish to talk with us, put the word “sı́” and also sign your name.
12 Okay, and on side number one we also need you to sign your name here where it
13 says: “signature of defendant”. . . . ’
14
At the end of the reading of the rights, Calhoun announces for the record that
Larson had just read the suspect his rights, and asks Larson to “give me a
statement concerning his understanding those rights, and, uh, if he has agreed
to talk or what.” Larson responds that “Luis” has said that he understood those
rights, and he mentions each of the rights, one by one. He finishes his response to
Calhoun with the following statement, which becomes the ‘go-ahead’ signal for
the questioning to begin: “. . . and understanding these rights to remain silent,
he agreed to, to talk with us.”
Larson is not alone in seeing his role as detective/interrogator: Calhoun, too,
demonstrates an ambivalence with respect to Larson’s role in the speech event.
He alternates between referring to himself, only, as interrogator, and plural
reference, using the subject pronoun ‘we’. One of the most striking examples
of Calhoun’s inclusionary pronominal usage, where ‘we’ refers to himself and
Larson, and possibly even to ‘the police department’ with all of its forensic
experts, is his listing of the evidence that they have against Alvarez. This comes
after a sequence of questions by Calhoun which gives the suspect a possible
justification for having become violent with the victim, namely, whether she had
done something to provoke him, for example, had she attacked him. To all of
Calhoun’s questions Alvarez replies either “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.”
Upon receiving a reply of “I don’t remember, I should not like to talk more about
this”, Calhoun suddenly becomes aggressive in his interrogation approach – a

ploy that is part of classic interrogating – and begins listing everything that he
and Larson purportedly know about the suspect’s involvement in the murder.
Extract 6
1
2 Calhoun: Okay. (Pause) We found a knife . . . in the bushes. There was blood on the knife. It
3 was your knife and we will be able to tell because of your fingerprints. . . .
4 Calhoun: There was blood on the knife. We will be able to tell whose blood it is. If it was
5 yours from if you cut yourself, or if it was from somebody else. . . .
6 Calhoun: We know that there’s blood on your clothes. . . .
7 Calhoun: And we will also know if that’s from him14 or from somebody else. . . .
8 Calhoun: We know that there’s blood on your shoes, and we will be able to tell if that blood
9 is yours or from somebody else. . . .
10 Calhoun: There was blood in your pants pocket from when you put your hand in your pants.
11 We will be able to tell if that blood was yours or somebody else’s, because we
12 took your blood sample. . . .
13 Calhoun: We’ll be able to take trace evidence from your hands and match it to other
14 evidence. . . .
15 Calhoun: I would simply like for him, if he can, to tell me why.
16 Larson: Nosotros simplemente quisiéramos que usted nos diga por qué.
17 ‘We would simply like for you to tell us why.’
After this listing of the pieces of key evidence that ‘they’ have, Calhoun ends
his implicit accusation with first-person reference (line 15), addressing Larson
directly, and Alvarez only indirectly. Larson, hearing the litany of forensic pieces
of evidence the police claim they have against the suspect, changes the first-
person singular ‘I’ and ‘me’ to plural ‘we’ and ‘ us’, thereby including himself
among those who possess all of this evidence against the detainee. This puts
him in a more powerful position relative to the detainee than if he were merely
an interpreter.
3.1.2.1. Moving into interrogator footing

Intruding himself into Calhoun’s self-references as a police officer is one thing.
Behaving in interrogator mode is another. Larson minimizes his role as in-
terpreter and insists on establishing a police interrogator footing both in the
presence of Calhoun and in his absence (at one point, Calhoun leaves the inter-
rogation room for a while). His behavior when Calhoun is away is considered
by the appeals court to be particularly “egregious”, but not because he is out
of role, but because he so flagrantly violates the suspect’s Miranda right to halt
the questioning when the latter no longer wishes to speak. Taking on the role
of interrogator while he is purportedly an interpreter for another police officer
would be unimaginable in a comparable situation where an interpreter is work-

ing with a lawyer and a witness who is undergoing cross-examination on the
witness stand. But this is not a courtroom; this is a police interrogation room.
Evidence of the attempts by Larson to preserve his status as police detec-
tive/interrogator, even while he is supposed to be serving as interpreter for
Calhoun and Alvarez, can be found in the fact that he often asks the suspect
questions on his own accord. This generally happens whenever he feels that
Calhoun is not being successful in getting adequate responses from Alvarez.
Other evidence of Larson’s interrogator footing while being on interpreter duty
is his regular challenging of the suspect’s answers. By repeating Alvarez’s an-
swers, usually with a question intonation, he indicates a lack of acceptance of
these answers, and an attitude of incredulity. Extracts 7 and 8 below demonstrate

both of these phenomena.
Extract 7 demonstrates how Larson momentarily leaves behind his interpreter
role, and steps into interrogator footing. He does so to help Calhoun obtain a
more informative answer to his question. The question was, where did he get the
knife that was used as the murder weapon. It is worth noting that even though
Alvarez is willing to answer Calhoun’s question, despite the numerous “I don’t
know” answers he gives, Larson does not find the answer satisfactory (line 6),
and probes further. He thus acts in typical police interrogator fashion.
Extract 7
1 Calhoun: Okay. Where did you get the knife?
2 Larson: ¿Dónde consiguió este cuchillo?
3 Alvarez: (u) lo encontré en un basurero.
4 ‘I found it in a garbage can.’
5 Larson: ¿Dónde? (u)
6 ‘Where? (u)’
7 Alvarez: Bueno, donde habı́a varias cosas tiradas.
8 ‘Well, where there were various things thrown away.’
9 Larson: He says he found it in a trash can along with other things that were thrown out,
10 thrown out.
Another instance of the police interpreter acting as interrogator comes after

Alvarez has in effect admitted to stabbing the young woman he followed from
the subway station, although at this point he still has not made a full, formal
confession. For this reason Calhoun continues to pressure him psychologically,
recycling a topic (Shuy 1998) that he has brought up numerous times already,
namely that something very bad happened to Alvarez that night. In Extract 8,
below, Larson on his own initiative asks Alvarez if he knew before Calhoun’s
announcement to him, that the young woman had died. The purpose of the
question is not to elicit any new factual information, but to make him even more
psychologically vulnerable to confessing.

Extract 8
1 Calhoun: I’m sorry for you Luis. A very bad thing that happened to you here. (Pause) You
2 didn’t want to hurt her, did you?
3 Alvarez: No entiendo lo que dice.
4 ‘I don’t understand what he is saying.’
5 Larson: ¿Usted no quiso hacerle tanto daño?
6 ‘You didn’t want to hurt her so much?’
7 Alvarez: No quiero hablar más. No quiero hablar más de nada.
8 ‘I don’t want to talk more. I don’t want to talk more about anything.’
9 Larson: ¿No sabı́a que estaba muerta?
10 ‘You didn’t know that she was dead?’

11 Alvarez: No. No quiero hablar más. No quiero saber nada más.
12 ‘No. I don’t want to talk more. I don’t want to know anything more.’
13 Larson: ¿No quiere saber nada más?
14 ‘You don’t want to know anything more?’
15 Alvarez: No, no quiero (u). No sé.
16 ‘No, I don’t want (u). I don’t know.’
17
Larson’s repetition (in line 13 of Extract 8) of the suspect’s statement about

not wanting to know anything else, which immediately follows his unmotivated
question regarding Alvarez’s knowledge that the victim had died, can be inter-
preted as an additional move to make him look blameworthy. It gives the suspect
the clear message that there is more that they, the police, know about the crime,
and by implication, about Alvarez’s involvement in it. One gets the impression
that Alvarez feels that if he heard more of the details of the murder, he would be
drawn more deeply into the police net. He seems to know intuitively, even with-
out a lawyer present, that to answer the substantive questions about the crime
would be to implicate himself in it.
Larson’s discourse strategy of repeatingAlvarez’s answers whenever he wants
to cast doubt on their veracity or genuineness of feeling is one frequently used
by police officers. It is the equivalent of saying to someone, “Are you sure about
that?” “Is that what you really feel?” “Is that what really happened?” Note the
repetition sequences involving Larson, in the extract below.
Extract 9 follows a question from Calhoun about Alvarez’s being stopped by
a police officer as he was running near the place where the victim’s body was
found.
Extract 9
1 Calhoun: Do you know where you were running to?
Larson: ¿Sabı́a adónde , adónde iba a, a correr?
3 ‘Did you know to where, to where you were going to, to run?’
4 Alvarez: No.
5 Larson: ¿No sabı́a, no?
6 ‘You didn’t know, no?’
7 Alvarez: No.
To Calhoun’s question, “The problem that you had was, was very bad. Is that
how you got the scratches on your hand?” Alvarez’s response is silence. When
Calhoun prods him with a code-switch, “It’s true? ¿Es verdad?” Alvarez replies
“No sé” (‘I don’t know’), which rather than to interpret in English, Larson
questions, asking, “¿No sabe?” (‘You don’t know?’). There is no verbal response
to this question from the suspect, although there may have been a nonverbal sign
indicating negation. All that is heard on the tape is Larson’s English response to
Calhoun, “He says he doesn’t know.”
It is clear from the pattern of “No sé” (‘I don’t know’) answers that they are
used by Alvarez when he is unwilling to admit damaging evidence to the police.
For example, he answers “No sé” to Calhoun’s question about whether he met
a girl that night, or why he had leaves in his hair, or whether he had been in
some bushes that night. And each time he answers “No sé” Larson questions
him with, “¿No sabe?”
Larson’s pattern of questioning Alvarez’s “I don’t know” answers should
be interpreted as an unwillingness to accept them. He knows that they could
not be true, since he and Calhoun are relatively sure that they have the right
person in custody for this crime. The constant refusal to accept “I don’t know”
for an answer is a form of coercion. It represents a way of pressuring Alvarez
into divulging incriminating information. In fact, at one point Calhoun asks
Alvarez to clarify whether these “I don’t know” answers mean that he doesn’t
understand, or that he doesn’t know the answer to the question. When Calhoun
asks this question in reference to whether Alvarez had met a girl that night, the
latter answers, “Pues, (pause) pues, cuando digo que no sé, es que me siento mal
contestar a la pregunta” (‘Well, (pause) well, when I say that I don’t know, it’s
that I feel bad answering the question’). So Larson might be correct in doubting
the truth of these “I don’t know” answers; nevertheless, these answers represent
Alvarez’s method of preserving his Miranda right not to talk to the police, and
Larson’s challenging repetitions of these refusals must be interpreted as a way
of subverting the suspect’s attempts at not incriminating himself.
The appellate court makes mention only of the repeated statements byAlvarez
to the effect that he would “not like to talk about this” or would “not like to talk
any more,” which are clear-cut invocations of his Miranda rights. The court does
not, however, pay as much attention to the pattern of Larson’s responses to the
“I don’t know” answers. Larson’s behavior with respect to the “I don’t know”
statements is just as coercive as his interrogating behavior in its other forms.
The discussion above deals with Larson’s behavior while he is serving as
interpreter for Calhoun and the suspect. However, once Calhoun has left the
room and Larson is alone with Alvarez, he becomes solely and completely a
police interrogator. Most insidious, perhaps, is his manipulation of his official
interpreting role to further his more important goals as interrogator. Specifically,
Larson appeals to Alvarez’s Hispanic ethnic identity and the fact that he is a
Spanish speaker, as a way of ‘claiming common ground’, since he, Larson, is
also a Spanish speaker, as opposed to Calhoun, who is not.15 He capitalizes
on his ability to communicate with Alvarez in Spanish. Thus, he begins the
interrogation with the statement, “Okay. Ah, creo que tuvimos un, una, una
problema en que estaba, yo estuve tratando de traducir por el otro. Okay?”
(‘Okay, I think that we had a, a, a problem in that I was, was trying to translate
for the other one. Okay?’). Larson capitalizes on the fact that Calhoun could not
speak to Alvarez in Spanish, and uses it as a way of trying to induce the latter
to open up to him, in Spanish. Extract 10 presents Larson’s discourse strategy
for persuading Alvarez to begin making admissions of guilt to him.
Extract 10
1 Larson: Umm, y al, al traducir y a hablar con usted y también con el o . . . con Dick
2 [Calhoun], ¿Okay?, umm, yo sentı́ que usted más o menos quiere hablar, pero
3 tenı́a problemas en hablar con un, una persona que no le entiende muy bien.
4 ‘Umm, and while, while translating and talking with you and also with the
5 oth . . . with Dick, Okay, umm, I felt that you more or less want to talk, but you had
6 problems in talking with a, a person that doesn’t understand you very well.’
7 Alvarez: Um hum.
8 Larson: Okay?
9 Alvarez: Um hum.
10 Larson: ¿Habı́a un problema en hablar con Dick porque él no, no sabı́a hablar
11 castellano?
12 ‘Was there a problem in talking with Dick because he, he didn’t know how to
13 speak Spanish?’
14 Alvarez: No. Sino que no quiero hablar más.
15 ‘No. It is just that I don’t want to talk more.’
Clearly, Larson’s ploy does not work. Alvarez did not say much to Calhoun
because he did not want to implicate himself in the murder. It was not because
Calhoun was not a Spanish-speaker. And even though Larson is speaking in
Spanish to Alvarez, Alvarez still resists his attempts to pry information from
him. He keeps referring to how bad he is feeling, and how he would rather not
talk about his “problem”.
Larson then tries another strategy, one which has been used by other inter-
rogators and which the courts have ruled in prior cases to be fundamentally
coercive: the appeal to religion and conscience. The full text of the interrogation
demonstrates how Larson the interrogator brings up the subject of the “errors”
that Alvarez may have committed in the past, and alluding to the “problem” that
he had had that night, links it to Alvarez’s Catholicism and to the fact that he
himself is a Catholic. Larson manages to get Alvarez talking about his religious
training as a youngster, about his love for God, the consequent need for repen-
tance when one has erred, and the danger of going to hell if one does not confess
one’s sins. The appellate court (Court of Appeal 19XX: 14) quotes from case
law to justify finding fault with Larson for using this strategy:
[A] state law enforcement officer conducting an interrogation of one accused of

crime may not use his own or the suspect’s personal religious beliefs as a tool
to extract admissions of guilt . . . [para.] Religious beliefs are not matters to be
used by governmental authorities to manipulate a suspect to say things he or
she otherwise would not say. The right to worship without fear is too precious a
freedom for us to tolerate an invasion and manipulation by state officials of the
religious beliefs of individuals, including those accused of crime. These tactics
constituted “deliberate means calculated to break the suspect’s will.”
Manuals on criminal interrogation such as Aubry et al. (1980: 198), however,

teach interrogators to use the theme of religion, if the suspect is religious, in
order to play upon his or her emotions. The appeal to religion is intended to
make the suspect feel the moral seriousness of the crime, and to bring about a
guilty conscience in him or her. Thus, there is a striking contradiction between
the advice given by interrogation manuals and the position of the courts in this
regard.
The appellate court singles out other discourse strategies as well, ones that
are used by Larson and Calhoun alike, which contribute to the coerciveness of
the interrogation: their use of “recurring themes”, for example, specifically, that
Alvarez should “overcome his unwillingness to talk about aspects of the crime,”
and that he should “agree to talk at a later time” (Court of Appeal 19XX: 15).
The court refers to the interrogation as constituting “relentless questioning”,
whose intended purpose was to give the suspect the clear impression that the
questioning would not end until his will broke.
Larson was more guilty of such behavior than was Calhoun: he was more
insistent on getting Alvarez to talk. What, specifically, did the court find ob-
jectionable in the style of questioning? Upon examining the data we see that
every time Alvarez said that he did not want to talk about his problem, or about
what had happened earlier in the evening, Larson would ask him, “When will
you want to talk about this? Tomorrow?” or else he would question him on his
reasons for not wanting to talk at that moment. At other times he would change
the subject, trying to give Alvarez the impression that he was complying with
his desire not to talk further about the events of the evening. But then within
one or two turns at talk,16 Larson would switch back to the topic of what had
happened that night, and the serious problem that the suspect had. Thus, it be-
came abundantly clear to Alvarez that Larson in his interrogation, and Calhoun
when he conducted the questioning, were not giving up on finding out the details
of the crime. In discourse analytical terms, each police officer in his own right
would “recycle” the topics of interest to them: the murder and the suspect’s in-
volvement in it. Similarly, the subtheme of blood is recycled several times: that
the victim’s blood was found on the suspect’s shoes, in his pants, on the knife
whose handle bore his finger prints. In the language of professional criminal
interrogators, this is an approach known as “constant repetition of one theme”,
and consists of “repeating the same questions or line of questioning over and
over again” (Aubry et al. 1980: 210).
This recurrent pattern of recycling topics, through the mechanism of chang-
ing the topic whenever the suspect invokes one of his Miranda rights but then
abruptly dropping that topic and shifting back to the true topic of interest to the
interrogator, is one of the tactics for what has been called by police interrogator
experts as the strategy of “keep the talk going” (Van Meter and Bopp 1973:
chapter 7). As Van Meter and Bopp (1973: 94) point out, in their advice to the
police, “An interrogation goes along only as long as the interrogator can keep it
going. It is up to you to keep the conversation flowing.”
3.1.3. Failure to interpret utterances

That Larson does not wholeheartedly accept the role of interpreter is evidenced
by his failure to interpret much of what is said at the interrogation: many of
the questions and statements of Calhoun, as well as the answers of Alvarez
remain as uttered, without interpretation by Larson. Yet, during the phase of
the questioning in which Calhoun is trying to obtain incriminating evidence
from the suspect, Larson is careful to interpret the questions and the answers for
the record (the interrogation is being audio-recorded, for future transcription).
Subsequent to Larson’s own interrogation of Alvarez, however, when Calhoun
returns to the interrogation room with a glass of water for Alvarez and resumes
the interrogation, Larson does not resume his interpreting duties. Perhaps this
happens because he had been in interrogating mode for quite a while, and had not
switched back into interpreter footing yet. This failure to take on his interpreting
obligations, however, makes for “trouble”, in the sense of Schegloff, Jefferson
and Sacks (1977). Things do not go smoothly. Calhoun and Alvarez, each in his
own right, need the interpreting services of Larson, which he is not providing.
Extract 11, below, reveals the trouble spots caused by Larson’s general failure to
take on the responsibilities of an interpreter. At the opening of this episode in the
interrogation, Calhoun has just entered the room and Larson is still interrogating
Alvarez. Calhoun in effect interrupts Larson’s questioning.
Extract 11
1 Calhoun: I was just gonna tell him this here.
2 Larson: Okay.
3 Calhoun: Luis?
4 Alvarez: Um hum.
5 Calhoun: I just did the laboratory tests.
6 Alvarez: Um hmm.
7 Calhoun: The blood . . . on your knife . . . the blood on your clothes.
8 Alvarez: Um hum.
9 Calhoun: It was hers.
10 Alvarez: Um.
11 Calhoun: It was hers. Okay, we just got done with those tests and it was hers. And on your
12 shoes and your pants . . . on your hands, it was hers.
13 Alvarez: Yeah.
14 Larson: ¿Entiende lo que dijo?
15 ‘Do you understand what he said?’
16 Alvarez: Sı́, que la sangre es de ella.
17 ‘Yes, that the blood is hers.’
18 Larson: ¿Una problema con eso?
19 ‘A problem with that?’
20 Alvarez: (u) No sé.
21 ‘I don’t know.’
22 Calhoun: (sigh) (Pause) I don’t know what to tell you, Luis. Uh, it is a very terrible problem
23 like you said.
24 Alvarez: Hum.
25 Calhoun: Blood in your pants pocket . . . blood on your shoes. It was all her blood.
26 Alvarez: Yeah.
27 Calhoun: She died.
28 Alvarez: She what?
29 Calhoun: She died.
30 Alvarez: ¿Qué dice?
31 ‘What is he saying?’
32 Larson: Está muerta.
33 (She is dead.)
34 (Pause)
35 Calhoun: Is something wrong?
36 (Long pause)
37 Calhoun: What do we need to do Luis?
38 Larson: ¿Qué tenemos que hacer?
39 ‘What do we have to do?’

40 Alvarez: No sé.
41 ‘I don’t know.’
This interrogation episode is carried out essentially without interpreting. When

Alvarez asks Calhoun for a repetition of his statement that the young woman has
died (line 28), on hearing it for the second time from Calhoun he asks Larson
in Spanish to tell him what Calhoun had said, implying that he should interpret
Calhoun’s words into Spanish for his benefit. Most likely he has understood
Calhoun’s statement, but needs a confirmation of it in Spanish, since the news is
so upsetting. If Larson were in interpreter footing, as he ought to be, there would
be no “trouble” of this sort. Larson would routinely be interpreting everything

said between the interrogator and the suspect. But he does not see himself
essentially as an interpreter, but rather, as an interrogator. For this reason, in line
18, after corroborating with Alvarez that he, Alvarez, understood what Calhoun
had announced to him, about the blood on his clothing being that of the stabbing
victim, Larson suddenly asks a question that only a police detective would. By
asking Alvarez if he has a problem with this latest forensic finding, Larson is
baiting him, goading him into saying something about his connection to the
girl’s blood and, by implication, to the stabbing of the girl. And yet, Alvarez
refrains from opening up and disclosing details – despite having only an eighth-
grade education, a lack of experience with the law, and a hangover aggravated
by exhaustion from not having slept at all that night. All of these factors were
taken note of by the appellate court. Nevertheless, as the questions continue
following this point in the interrogation, he begins to break, and confesses to
having had contact with the murder victim as he followed her out of the subway
station. The interrogation is soon to end.
4. Conclusions
Carlos RiveraAlvarez’s first-degree murder conviction was reversed by the Court

of Appeal.17 In their ruling, the judges referred to the “flagrancy of the official
misconduct”, and considered the illegality to have a “quality of purposefulness”:
That its purpose was intended to reduce the defendant’s resistance to the interro-
gating officers’ desire for a confession is likewise beyond dispute. That purpose
was effected by a persistent disregard of defendant’s constitutional right to remain
silent and not incriminate himself. With respect to flagrancy, this is a glaring ex-
ample of police misconduct. (Court of Appeal 19XX: 17)
The appeals court explained that its rationales for reversing the conviction were
(1) the general goal of deterring improper police conduct, and (2) assuring
trustworthy evidence, as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment (Court of Appeal
19XX: 17). Specifically, the court hoped to “instill in those particular officers,
or in their future counterparts, a greater degree of care toward the rights of
an accused” (Court of Appeal 19XX: 17). In short, the reversal of Alvarez’s
conviction was intended to serve as a deterrent against future such misconduct.
From a discourse perspective, the two police officers in this case had engaged
in “extensive badgering and softening up” of the suspect, to use the accusatory
terminology of Alvarez’s defense attorney. These are lay terms for the discourse
phenomena described previously: topic recycling, repetition, appeals to common
Conclusions 63
ground (e.g., shared religious beliefs), concern for the interlocutor’s positive face
needs (e.g., expressions of empathy and sympathy).
The case of Carlos Rivera Alvarez centers on police violation of the Miranda
rights. While the defense attorney and appellate court were in agreement on
how the police interrogators effectuated their misconduct, they seem to have
overlooked one important element in this instance of police wrongdoing, and
that is that one of the police interrogators was not properly executing the role that
he had been delegated with, namely, legal interpreter. As I explain in chapter 2,
legal interpreters are expected to adhere to a set of norms required by their
profession, yet it is an open question whether in all the documented criminal
cases in which the police have served as interpreters, the police have abided by
those norms.
The police detective assigned the role of interpreter in the Alvarez interro-
gation flagrantly ignored the guidelines of legal interpreting. At the same time,
he became an active participant in helping the designated interrogator coerce a
confession from the suspect. He in effect became an interrogator. Such a shift in
footing has been noted in other sociolegal settings where interpreters are at work
(Berk-Seligson 1999b; Berk-Seligson and Trinch 1999), and seems to be par for
the course in community interpreting contexts other than legal ones (Davidson
2000; Roy 2000; Wadensjõ 1998). These shifts in footing indicate that social
interaction is a collaborative effort, and interpreters become part of that collab-
orative effort, working toward the goal shared by the designated interviewer and
the interviewee.
Police interviews and interrogations stand in marked contrast to other types
of community interpreting events. There is no presumption on the part of de-
tainees or of interrogating officers that the goal of the interrogation is to better
the quality of life of the person being questioned. In short, this is fundamentally
an adversarial speech situation. In contrast, in most other community inter-
preting contexts, interviewers and interviewees do not presume an adversarial
relationship from the very outset, although in particular instances even a medical
interview can turn into a hostile encounter. Typically, in community interpreting
contexts, interpreters place themselves in an advocacy footing with respect to
the client. They generally have the client’s best interests in mind.
The case of The People v. Alvarez demonstrates the dangers of using the
police as interpreters at interrogations. The danger is that the police interpreter
will not remain in interpreter footing, but will shift back and forth between
interpreter and police interrogator. The potential for this to happen is particularly
great because, as in other situations involving legal interpreters, the suspect or
defendant may assume at the outset that the person who has been assigned to
help him or her understand what the interrogator is asking, is actually trying
to help him or her in a broader sense and is taking his or side (Berk-Seligson
1990, 2000; Morris 1999). Thus, to play the role of interpreter when one really
considers him/herself to be in police detective footing, is one way of subverting
the Miranda rights. It is a way of seducing a suspect into talking. To be a bilingual
police officer assigned the role of interpreter at an interrogation is to give oneself
a great advantage as a detective, and that is the enhanced ability to manipulate
the detainee. This advantage puts the Miranda rights in greater jeopardy than
usual, for a police detective who is in the footing of interpreter might easily turn
out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Appendix 1
Extract of first interrogation of Carlos Alvarez,
aka Luis González18
1 Calhoun: Okay. You, you met a, a girl tonight, didn’t you Luis?
2 Larson: ¿Conoció a una muchacha esta noche?
3 ‘Did you meet a girl tonight?’
4 Alvarez: No sé. No sé. No recuerdo.
5 ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t remember.’
6 Larson: He says he doesn’t know. He doesn’t remember.
7 Calhoun: It’s a bad thing that happened tonight, right?
8 Larson: ¿Fue una cosa mala que pasó esta noche, no?
9 ‘It was a bad thing that happened tonight, no?’
10 Alvarez: Sı́, pero (pause) no, no quisiera seguir hablando de eso.
11 ‘Yes, but (pause) I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t like to continue talking about that.’
12 Larson: Okay, he doesn’t want to continue talking about this.
13 Calhoun: Okay. Can we talk about some other things?
14 Larson: ¿Podemos hablar de otras cosas?
15 ‘Can we talk about some other things?’
16 Alvarez: Sı́. Sı́. (u)
17 Larson: Yes. Yes. (u)
18 Alvarez: Yeah, if we want.
19 Calhoun: Okay. Were, were you gonna go back to Mexico soon?
20 Larson: ¿Iba a regresar a México recién?
21 ‘Were you going to return to Mexico recently?’
22 Alvarez: Querı́a estar allá en diciembre.
23 ‘I wanted to be there in December.’
24 Larson: He wanted to be there in December.
25 Alvarez: Por la navidad.
26 ‘For Christmas.’
Larson: For Christmas.
27
28 ...
29 Calhoun: Okay. Ah, would you tell him that, ah (pause) we . . . we pretty much know what
30 happened?
31 Larson: Okay. Luis, generalmente nosotros sabemos que pasó.
32 ‘Okay. Luis, generally we know what happened.’
33 Alvarez: Um hum.
34 Calhoun: I would . . . I need to fill in just a couple of areas.
35 Larson: Necesitamos saber qué pasó en unos áreas que todavı́a no están muy (u).
36 ‘We need to know what happened in some areas that are not yet very (u).’
37 Calhoun: Okay. Did she attack you in any way? Did she hurt you in
38 any way?
39 Larson: Este muchacha, ¿le atacó a usted o le, le hizo daño a usted?
66 Appendix 1
40 ‘This girl, did she attack you or did she hurt you, you?’
41 Alvarez: No recuerdo.
42 ‘I don’t remember.’
43 Larson: He doesn’t remember.
44 Calhoun: Okay, Did you want to hurt her just a little bit? Did you just want to scare her?
45 Larson: ¿La quiso . . . ? (unintelligible)
46 ‘Did you want . . . ?’
47 Calhoun: Did you just want to try to scare her a little bit?
48 Larson: ¿La muchacha esta noche . . . La quiso asustarla, nada más . . . esta noche?
49 ‘The girl tonight . . . did you want to scare her, nothing more . . . tonight?’
50 Alvarez: No recuerdo, no quisiera hablar de esto más.
19
51 ‘I don’t remember, I should not like to talk more about this.’
20
52 Larson: He doesn’t remember, and he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore.
53 ............................................................................
54 Calhoun: I would simply like for him, if he can, to tell me why.
55 Larson: Nosotros simplemente quisiéramos que usted nos diga por qué.
56 ‘We would simply like for you to tell us why.’
57 Alvarez: No, no quiero hablar de esto más.
58 ‘No, I don’t want to talk more about this.’
59 Larson: He doesn’t want to talk about this anymore.
60 Calhoun: Okay. (Pause) He doesn’t want to talk to us anymore
61 about this or he doesn’t want to talk to us anymore, period?
62 Larson: ¿No, no quiere hablar de esto especı́ficamente o no quiere hablar en todo?
63 ‘You don’t want to talk about this specifically or you don’t want to talk in all
64 (sic)?’
65 Alvarez: Me siento mal. No quisiera hablar de nada.
66 (I feel badly. I should not like to talk about anything.)
67 Larson: ¿Cómo?
68 ‘What?’
69 Alvarez: Me siento mal y no quisiera hablar de nada.
70 ‘I feel badly, and I should not like to talk about anything.’
71 Larson: He says he feels bad, and would rather not talk about anything like that.
72 Calhoun: Okay. What do you think is going to happen now? What do you
73 think is going to happen to you?

74 Larson: ¿Qué piensa usted que va a pasar ahora?
75 ‘What do you think is going to happen to you?’
76 Alvarez: Pues, no sé. Pienso que tal vez me metan a la carcel.
21
77 (Well, I don’t know. I think that perhaps they will put me in jail.)
78 ............................................................................
79 Larson: Okay. Hay . . . hay un porque no quiere hablar?
22
80 ‘Okay. Is there . . . is there a why [sic] you don’t want to talk?’
81 Alvarez: Porque siento que no es el momento.
82 ‘Because I feel that it is not the time.’
83 Larson: ¿No es el momento? Okay. Cuando usted dice que no es el momento, ¿por qué
84 dice eso?
Appendix 1 67
85 ‘It isn’t the time? Okay. When you say that it is not the time, why do you say
86 that?’
87 Alvarez: Porque yo me siento mal. No quiero recordar eso. Quisiera por el momento
88 olvidar, olvidarme del problema que tuve. Me siento cansado.
89 ‘Because I feel badly. I don’t want to remember that. I should
90 like, for the moment, to forget, to forget the problems that I had.
91 I feel tired.’
92 Larson: ¿Siente cansado?
93 ‘You feel tired?’
94 Alvarez: Y no quisiera hablar más.
95 ‘And I should not like to talk more.’
96 Larson: Okay. ¿Qué tal si hablamos un poquito más, okay? Yo tengo unas dudas en qué
97 pasó.
98 ‘Okay. How about if we talk a little more, okay? I have some doubts in (sic) what
99 happened.’
100 Alvarez: Uh huh.
101 Larson: ¿Okay? Ah, yo sien . . . Bueno, yo ,. . . yo también, yo no estoy . . . Bueno. Generalmente
102 yo estoy durmiendo a estas horas, okay ?Entonces, también tengo
103 cansan . . . des . . . cansado,? ‘okay?
104 ‘Okay? I fee . . . Well, I . . . I also, I am not . . . Well. Generally I am sleeping at this
105 time, okay? Then I am also ti . . . res . . . tired, okay?’
106 ............................................................................
107 Larson: Okay. ¿Usted es de México, no?
108 ‘Okay. You are from Mexico, no?’
109 Alvarez: Estoy . . . sı́ estuve en México.
110 ‘I am . . . yes I was in Mexico.’
111 Larson: Okay. Okay. ¿Qué? usted dice que . . . que quiere olvidar todo que pasó esta noche,
112 ¿piensa que puede?
113 ‘Okay. Okay. What? You say that . . . that you want to forget all that happened
114 tonight. Do you think you can?’
115 Alvarez: (u)
116 Larson: Okay. Cuando usted ha hecho errores en, en el pasado.
117 ‘Okay. When you have made errors in, in the past . . . ’
118 Alvarez: Um hum.

119 Larson: Okay. ¿Cómo ha pasado por los errores?
120 ‘Okay. How have you passed by (sic) the errors?’
121 Alvarez: No sé qué clase de errores.
122 I don’t know what kind of errors.
123 Larson: Bueno, no importa qué clase, okay? Yo he aprendido que . . . lo mejor manera
124 para . . . para sobrevenir un error o un problema es de hablar de, del problema.
125 ‘Well, it doesn’t matter what kind, okay? I have learned that . . . the best way to . . .
126 to overcome an error or a problem is of [sic] to talk of the problem.’
127 Alvarez: Huh.
128 Larson: ¿Okay? Y el problema que tenı́a esta noche, ahhhh, es, es un poquito grave,
129 ¿okay?
68 Appendix 1
130 ‘Okay? And the problem that you had tonight, ahhhh, is, is a little serious, okay?’
131
132 Yo, yo sé que usted también sabe eso, pero a veces es, es mejor de hablar de este
133 problema para que usted puede, ¿cómo se dice?, umm, dejar que los sentimientos
134 sale un poquito.
135 ‘I know that you also know that, but sometimes it is, it is better of (sic) talking of
136 this problem so that you can–how do you say?–um, let the feelings come out a
137 little.’
138 Alvarez: Okay.
139 Larson: Ahora usted tiene todo el sentimiento de esta noche aquı́ en su pecho, okay?
140 Nadie sabe lo que está pasando. Nadie sabe lo que está . . . lo que pasó.
141 ‘Now you have all the feeling of tonight here in your chest, okay? No one knows
142 what you are thinking. No one knows what you are . . . what happened.’
144 Larson: Okay. Usted, usted sólo sabe qué, qué estaba sintiendo.
145 ‘Okay. You, only you know what, what you were feeling.’
147 Larson: ¿Okay? Ah, nosotros estamos aquı́ también para sentir lo que usted sintiendo.
148 ¿Entiende? Okay? Ah, es católico, no?
149 ‘Okay? We are also here to feel what you are feeling. Do you understand?
150 Okay? You are Catholic, no?’
151 Alvarez: Sı́, soy católico.
152 ‘Yes. I am Catholic.’
153 Larson: Okay, y . . . bueno . . . ¿ha, ha hecho puro catecismo, por los clases?
154 ‘Okay, and . . . well . . . have you done only catechism, through the classes?’
155 Alvarez: Uh huh.
156 Larson: Okay. ¿Qué, qué le han enseñado en los clases?
157 ‘Okay. What, what have they taught you in the classes?’
158 Alvarez: Pues, el amor a Dios, el respeto a Dios.
159 ‘Well, the love of God, the respect for God.’
160 Larson: Um hum.
161 Alvarez: Y la manera que se puede vivir junto a El.
162 ‘And the way that one can live by Him.’
163 Larson: Um hum.

164 Alvarez: (u), respetarlo, pues, siguiendo lo que El dice.
165 ‘(u) to respect Him, well, following what he says.’
166 Larson: Okay. Yo también amo a Dios. ¿Okay? Yo, yo sé que una de las cosas básicas de,
167 de la iglesia es el arrepentimiento, ¿no es ası́?
168 ‘Okay. I also love God. Okay? I, I know that one of the basic things of
169 the church is repentance, isn’t that right?’
170 Alvarez: Sı́.
171 ‘Yes.’
172 Larson: Okay, y también yo sé que uno de los pasos básicos de el arrepentimiento es que
173 a . . . admitimos que erramos. Okay? No, no podemos seguir adelante sin . . . sin
174 decir que . . . que habı́a un problema. Okay? Y ahora nosotros estamos tratando de
Appendix 1 69
175 ayudarle..en este respecto. ¿Me entiende?

176 ‘Okay, and I also know that one of the basic steps of
177 repentance is that we . . . we admit that we erred. Okay? We can’t,
178 we can’t continue forward without . . . without saying that . . . that there
179 was a problem. Okay? And now we are trying to help you in this
180 respect. Do you understand me?’
181 Alvarez: Sı́.
182 ‘Yes.’
183 Larson: Okay. Yo sé que es importante que usted nos hable de este problema. Porque si
184 no habla de, a nadie usted va a, a caer, ¿entiende?
185 ‘Okay. I know that it is important that you talk to us about this
186 problem. Because if you don’t talk of, to anyone you are going to,
187 to fall. Do you understand?’
188 Alvarez: Sı́.
189 ‘Yes.’
190 Larson: Okay. Y por eso queremos hablar un poco.
191 ‘Okay. And therefore we want to talk a little.’
192 Alvarez: Pero es que no, no quisiera yo.
193 ‘But it is that no, I shouldn’t like to.’
194 Larson: ¿Cómo?
195 ‘What?’
196 Alvarez: No quisiera hablar de eso.
197 ‘I shouldn’t like to talk of that.’
198 Larson: ¿Quiere hablar de esto más tarde?
199 ‘Do you want to talk about this later?’
200 Alvarez: Quizás.
201 ‘Perhaps.’
202 Larson: Bueno, cuando di . . . dice quizás, qué quiere decir quizás?
203 ‘Well, when you say . . . say perhaps, what does perhaps mean?’
204 Alvarez: Más tarde, mañana.
205 ‘Later, tomorrow.’
206 Larson: ¿Mañana?
207 ‘Tomorrow?’
208 Alvarez: Tal vez.

209 ‘Maybe.’
210 Larson: ¿Tal vez quiere hablar mañana?
211 ‘Maybe you want to talk tomorrow?’
212 Alvarez: Sı́.
213 ‘Yes.’
214 Larson: ¿Pero no quiere hablar ahora?
215 ‘But you don’t want to talk now.’
216 Alvarez: No ahora.
217 ‘Not now.
218 Larson: ¿Por qué?
219 ‘Why?’
70 Appendix 1
220 Alvarez: Pues, quisiera relajarme . . . pensando en el error que cometı́. Más cosas.
221 ‘Well, I should like to relax . . . thinking about the error that I
222 committed. More things.’
223 Larson: Sobre (u)
224 ‘About (u)’
225 Alvarez: Sobre mi vida, sobre lo que voy a hacer, sobre lo que va a pasar conmigo.
226 ‘About my life, about what I am going to do, about what is going
227 to happen to me . . . Right now I don’t have the slightest idea
228 what is going to happen to me.’
229 ............................................................................
230 Larson: Um hum. Okay. ¿Sabe qué ha pasado esta noche?
231 ‘Um hum. Okay. Do you know what has happened tonight?’
232 Alvarez: Sı́, yo sé qué ha pasado.
233 ‘Yes, I know what has happened.’
234 Larson: Okay. ¿Qué ha pasado?
235 ‘Okay. What has happened?’
236 Alvarez: De eso es lo que no quiero hablar.
237 ‘That is what I don’t want to talk about.’
Chapter 4
Coercion and its limits: admitting to murder but
resisting an accusation of attempted rape
Chapter 3 has shown how a suspect’s right not to incriminate himself was sys-
tematically denied him by two police detectives, despite his frequently repeated
statement that he did not wish to talk about the crime that they were alluding
to – murder. Yet during another interrogation by the same police officers, the
suspect – Carlos Rivera Alvarez – took on a different stance, actively resisting
the intimation that he had attempted to commit a sexual crime. This chapter
analyzes that interrogation.
A recurring issue within the field of Language and the Law is how power
is enacted linguistically in the day-to-day interactions between institutional au-
thorities and those who come into contact with them. Power in sociolegal pro-
ceedings is generally assumed to reside in actors vested with such authority by
the institutions that employ them. Such power can clearly be seen to be held
by police detectives engaged in interrogating crime suspects, as has been seen
in chapter 3. Nevertheless, detainees are not completely powerless participants
in such speech events. Evidence drawn from the second interrogation of Carlos
Rivera Alvarez, who was being held for murder and attempted rape, reveals the
linguistic mechanisms that detainees can make use of when they resist police
attempts to implicate them in a crime. Surprisingly, even a Limited-English
speaking undocumented Hispanic youth, presumably in an entirely powerless
position, can manage to employ strategies of resistance despite the asymmetry
of power.23 I will show that a detainee can make use of the very same mecha-
nisms used by his interrogators, and employ them to resist their efforts to elicit a
confession from him. Specifically, the use of vague and euphemistic language,
repetition, and fragmented rather than narrative answers become the suspect’s
defensive tools for maintaining a posture of innocence. Taking on a stance of
resistance, he refuses to yield to the pressures placed on him to confess.
This chapter will demonstrate that coercive interrogation techniques have
their limits: when a detainee feels strongly enough about a facet of his identity
that is under attack, he will put up a resistance. In the case of Carlos Alvarez, the
aspect of his identity that he so fervently defended was his sense of machismo, or
virility. There is no question as to his guilt in the murder: his defense attorneys at
the appellate stage state this quite explicitly. What is at issue is the second charge,
attempted rape, and Alvarez’s conviction for it at the trial court stage of judicial
72 Coercion and its limits
process is what his lawyers attempt to appeal. Their efforts are unsuccessful.
The conviction is upheld.
A microlinguistic analysis of the interrogation techniques used by the police
in their second interrogation of Alvarez will show how detectives can construct
an accusation of sexual violence over a series of question/answer sequences.
This chapter thus focuses on the power held by interrogators – specifically police
officers – to extract information from the interrogated, and the power held by
the interrogated, namely the ability to withhold information being sought after.
In short, this chapter focuses on power and resistance.
The case of Carlos Alvarez deals primarily with murder and only secondarily
with attempted rape. An analysis of the interrogation shows that the tactics used
by Officers Calhoun and Larson are ones of gradually constructing a portrayal
of the detainee as a would-be rapist, and depicting his failed rape attempt as
the principal motive for the murder. The enigma facing the analyst is why the
police were successful in eliciting a confession to murder, a crime that carried
with it the threat of life imprisonment or the death penalty, but failed in their
attempt to obtain a confession to what was, at least in terms of potential penalties,
a less serious crime – attempted rape. Only when a full understanding of the
detainee’s sociocultural background is posited as one of the explanations for this
paradoxical finding can this enigma be understood.
1. The linguistic construction of sexual violence through

interrogation
A number of studies of language in legal settings have shown that sexually
violent behavior, including rape, can be constructed by interrogators through
a variety of linguistic means. Matoesian (1995, 1999, 2001) and Conley and
O’Barr (1998) make the point that while the ordinary tactics used by attorneys
for cross-examining witnesses typically result in a domination of examinees, in

rape trials such strategies will go even further, producing a “revictimization of
the victim”. Whether it is through lexical choice, such as a repeated reference to
the victim’s “having pantyhose on” (Conley and O’Barr 1998: 36), or syntactic
form, such as the use of statements rather than questions, or aspects of conver-
sational structure, such as the management of sequence type and the restriction
of topics through the manipulation of question/answer sequences (Matoesian
1993: 100), lawyers have been shown to dominate women on the witness stand
who make accusations of rape. Atkinson and Drew (1979: 258), using a con-
versational analytic methodology as does Matoesian (1993, 1995), demonstrate
how a lawyer can convey his skepticism of the testimony of the victim of an
The linguistic construction of sexual violence through interrogation 73
alleged rape by repeating her statements and by prefacing those repetitions with
the phrase, “You say”. Drew (1992: 472), in analyzing the speech of lawyer and
alleged victim in another rape trial, discovers the devices that a lawyer will use
to discredit the witness, among them being offering “alternative and compet-
ing descriptions or versions of events.” Atkinson and Drew (1979), Matoesian
(1993), and Conley and O’Barr (1998) all point out that rape victims on the
witness stand at times try to defend themselves against the unflattering char-
acterizations of them insinuated by lawyers, but that their efforts at countering
such insinuations more often than not fail.
Alleged rape victims are not the only ones who defend themselves against
the insinuations of lawyers. Those who are accused of rape also have been
found to marshal their linguistic forces against interrogators who try to cast
them in a blameworthy light. Ehrlich’s (2001) analysis of acquaintance rape
hearings and trial proceedings involving a college student accused of sexual
assault finds that the accused used a constellation of syntactic features which
together comprise a “grammar of non-agency”, and that he used this grammar
to divest himself of responsibility for any actions that could be construed as
constituting sexual violence. The grammar identified by Ehrlich functioned to
(1) mitigate agency, through adverbials such as ‘perhaps’, (2) diffuse agency, by
representing events as consensual and reciprocal, (3) obscure agency, through
the use of agentless passives, and (4) eliminate agency, via the use of unac-
cusative constructions (i.e., “intransitive verbs which take as their grammatical
subjects non-agents or non-causers of the actions or processes designated by
the intransitive verbs” (Haegeman and Gueron 1999, as quoted in Ehrlich 2001:
49)). Matoesian (1999), too, examines the ways in which a man accused of sex-
ual violence defends himself under interrogation. Analyzing the testimony of
William Kennedy Smith at his high-profile rape trial, Matoesian shows how the
defendant deflected the insinuations of the prosecutor by taking on the footing of
“expert witness”, namely physician, and as such countered the prior testimony
of an authorized expert, a physician who had testified as to the injuries sustained

by the alleged victim.
Resistance to questioners in courtroom settings is not limited to rape cases.
The research of Cotterill (2003b) and Harris (1989) shows that defendants in
other sorts of criminal cases use a variety of linguistic strategies to resist the
power and control of attorneys, and Philips (1998) comes to similar conclusions
with respect to the interaction between defendants and judges. Philips demon-
strates that in the process of changing their plea from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’,
defendants regularly resist confessing to those acts that judges deem necessary
for establishing a ‘factual basis’ for a guilty plea. Defendants in such a context
regularly use three types of resistance: denial (“Defendants often directly deny
some element of a crime for which there must be evidence”), obscurity (“De-
fendants often give responses to questions that are uninterpretable or obscure
so that they really do not make sense and do not contribute to a relevant court
record”) and mitigation (“Defendants frequently contribute information to the
factual basis that appears intended to remove blame from themselves, and in
some cases to put it onto others, or to present their actions in a light that shows
them to have intentions of a positive, blameless, or simply human kind, which
in other circumstances might have positive consequences and be viewed favor-
ably”) (Philips 1998: 93). In short, resistance to those who usually hold power
in a courtroom apparently is more widespread than what might be expected.
The case analyzed in this chapter deals with the linguistic construction of
sexual assault, but not at the trial court stage. Rather, the context is that of a
police interrogation in the investigation of a crime. The study focuses on the
management of an accusation by the police shortly after they have arrested a
young man whom they suspect of murder and attempted rape, and the resistance
of that suspect to the accusation.
2. Background of the case

Chapter 3 reviewed the case of eighteen-year old Carlos Alvarez, an undocu-
mented young man of Mexican origin who had been charged with first-degree
murder and attempted rape and subsequently was convicted of both crimes and
sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. Four years after
his arrest, an appellate court reversed the conviction of first-degree murder (not
freeing the defendant, but decreasing the time he was to spend in prison), yet it
upheld the attempted rape conviction. The basis for the reversal of Alvarez’s con-
viction, argued the appeals court, was the use of coercive interrogation tactics
by the police in extracting a confession from him.
As the reader will recall, Alvarez was considered by the court to have been
caught running away from the scene of the crime, a row of hedges dividing a
parking lot adjacent to a metro station. In the words of the appellate judge who
wrote the opinion, “the semi-nude body of a young woman was found” behind
the hedge, the place where the defendant was believed to have begun “a stabbing
frenzy” (Court of Appeal, page 2). The wording used by the judge hints strongly
at a sexually motivated type of murder: the fact that the victim was semi-nude
and young. It also depicts the perpetrator as having been out-of-control, in that
he had stabbed her repeatedly. The judge also points out that the defendant had
not eaten anything on the evening of the murder, but had drunk eight or nine
beers. From this commentary the reader is meant to infer that Alvarez must
Background of the case 75
have been inebriated on the night of the murder, a factor that could lead to the
reasonable assumption of an out-of-control defendant, and to partially account
for his violent behavior.
From the perspective of the attempted rape charge alone, this case has all
the earmarks of what sociolegal scholars call ‘stranger rape’, which has been
distinguished from ‘acquaintance rape’ (Ehrlich 2001, 2007; Figueiredo 2000;
Tiersma 2007). Also called ‘real rape’ (or ‘prototypical rape’) as opposed to
‘simple rape’ (Estrich 1987), the former is generally depicted as involving an
armed stranger who jumps out from behind bushes. Simple rape, in contrast,
occurs between two people who know each other: they may be on a date, they
may be supervisor and employee, or someone a woman has just met at a bar.
Generally there is no weapon involved and no noticeable sign of injury on the
victim. Estrich cites the study of Kalven and Zeisel (1966), which demonstrates
that the criminal justice system is much more likely to prosecute and convict a
person accused of ‘aggravated rape’, that is, ‘real rape’than it is a person accused
of ‘simple rape’. Figuereido’s (2000) empirical study of rape cases adds a further
dimension to what is considered by the justice system to be a ‘real rape’ case:
the victim is either a young girl or a respectable old woman. Carlos Alvarez
perfectly matches the description of the prototypical, stranger rapist.
Alvarez underwent two interrogations, both conducted by Officer Calhoun,
the monolingual English-speaking police detective, with the aid of Officer Lar-
son, the non-Hispanic Spanish/English-speaking bilingual detective acting as
interpreter. The first interrogation began at 4:03 in the morning and the sec-
ond – initiated at the request of Alvarez – started at noon of the same day. In
short, both interrogations were carried out within twenty-four hours of the mur-
der, when the sequence of events surrounding it were still fresh in the detainee’s
mind. The appellate court considered the first interrogation to have yielded what
was “tantamount to a confession” by the suspect under coercive conditions, and
for this reason anything he had said during the second interrogation was to be
considered “tainted” by the coercive nature of the first one.

It is the thesis of this chapter that the defendant’s verbal behavior in reaction to
police coercion during the first interrogation superficially appears to be different
from that which he displayed during the second one, namely, that at the first
interrogation he simply refused to provide factual information related to the
murder by repeatedly saying that he felt bad and did not wish to talk about his
“problem”. Clearly he was doing his utmost to resist the efforts of the police to
induce him to confess to the murder. By the end of that interrogation, however, he
implicated himself sufficiently to be considered by the police to have confessed.
The second interrogation, which officially he himself had requested, albeit
at the urging of the police, focused on the accusation of attempted rape. While
he ostensibly seemed to be answering the detectives’ questions, the manner in

which he did so represents a form of resistance, one that is different from the
approach that he used at the first interrogation. It is the nature of this other type
of resistance that will be addressed in this chapter.
3. The management of an accusation and resistance to it
The accusation of attempted rape begins with the police suggesting to the suspect
a motive for his attack on her. The suggestion occurs two-thirds of the way into
the first interrogation, and is mentioned in passing, à propos of nothing that
had been said thus far, from a discourse point of view totally disconnected from
what had been said immediately prior to it. After talking about “the problem”
that Alvarez had had earlier that evening – never once specifying the nature
of the problem he was alluding to – Calhoun suddenly asks him some pointed
questions about the behavior of the young woman he had met in the parking
lot of the metro station. The significance of the line of questioning is that it
suggests to the detainee a justification for actions that he has not yet admitted
to, but which he can foresee could be upcoming in nearby question turns. Thus
far in the interrogation, no mention has been made of the topic of murder, rape,
or even of anyone having been injured in any way.
Extract 1
1 Calhoun: Okay. Ah, would you tell him that, ah (pause) we . . . we pretty much know what
2 happened?
3 Larson: Okay. Luis, generalmente nosotros sabemos qué pasó.24
4 ‘Okay. Luis, generally we know what happened.’25
5 Alvarez: Um hum.
6 Calhoun: I would . . . I need to fill in just a couple of areas.
7 Larson: Necesitamos saber qué pasó en unos áreas que todavı́a no están muy (inaudible).
8 ‘We need to know what happened in some areas that are not yet very (inaudible).’
9 Calhoun: Okay. Did she attack you in any way? Did she hurt you in any way?
10 Larson: ¿Este muchacha, le atacó a usted o le, le hizo daño a usted?
11 ‘This girl, did she attack you or did she hurt you, you?’
12 Alvarez: No recuerdo.
13 ‘I don’t remember.’
14 Larson: He doesn’t remember.
15 Calhoun: Okay, did you want to hurt her just a little bit? Did you just want to scare her?
16 Larson: ¿La quiso . . . ? (inaudible)
17 ‘Did you want . . . ?’ (inaudible)
18 Calhoun: Did you just want to try to scare her a little bit?
19 Larson: ¿La muchacha esta noche . . . La quiso asustarla, nada más . . . esta noche?
20 ‘The girl tonight . . . did you want to scare her, nothing more . . . tonight?’
The management of an accusation and resistance to it 77
21 Alvarez: No recuerdo, no quisiera hablar de esto más.

22 ‘I don’t remember, I should not like to talk more about this.’
23 Larson: He doesn’t remember, and he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore.
The interrogation sequence presented in Extract 1 is important both from a dis-

course perspective and from the standpoint of doing policework in interrogation
contexts. By proposing a rationale for the suspect’s having stabbed the victim
(lines 9, 15 and 18), the police are giving him a way out, a plausible and psycho-
logically excusable reason for the acts they believe he committed. By shifting
the responsibility for his actions onto the victim (i.e., if she had not provoked
him, he would not have killed her), the detectives are empathizing with him, and
conveying the impression that they can understand what might have led him to
take such an action against a young woman. The strategy is highly successful,
because once the detainee really starts to talk, in the second interrogation, he
uses the same justification provided him by the police, sometimes using their
very phrases, over and over again.
Noteworthy is the use of the active voice with agent-naming when Calhoun
asks if the girl had attacked Alvarez. Clearly it is to make the girl look blame-
worthy, and Alvarez’s violence simply a reaction to being attacked. Similarly,
in accounting for Alvarez’s behavior toward the young woman, by asking him
if he “wanted to hurt her just a little bit”, “just wanted to scare her”, Calhoun
is making Alvarez’s actions appear to be less weighty, of less consequence, and
easier to comprehend. In short, the detective is mitigating the gravity of the
crime, a common police tactic for eliciting a confession (Napier and Adams
1998; Yeschke 1993). Affirmative answers by Alvarez to his questions would
imply that if he did attempt to rape her and then murdered her in the botched
attempt, then his acts could be considered to be not premeditated.
Only at one other point during the first interrogation does the topic of whether
the young woman had hurt Alvarez arise, and this is when Detective Larson is left
alone with him. Calhoun had left the room purportedly to find out the results of
laboratory tests performed on the blood stains he claims were found on Alvarez’s
clothing.
Extract 2
1 Larson: Luis, okay. El o . . . Dick ya le dijo que nosotros podemos hacer, okay, en cuanto a
2 las huellas, um, sangre y todo eso . . .
3 ‘Luis, okay. The oth . . . Dick already told you what we can do as far as the prints,
4 um blood and all that is concerned . . . ’
5 Alvarez: Sı́.
6 ‘Yes.’
7 Larson: . . . okay? Quisiéramos saber qué pasó antes que podemos ver el sangre y todo,
8 okay? Es (pause) quisiera saber . . . , quisiéramos saber si, si habı́a un problema

9 donde este muchacha hizo algo a usted o dijo algo a usted . . .
10 ‘. . . okay? We would like to know what happened before we can see the blood and
11 all, okay? It’s (pause), I would like . . . we would like to know if there was a
12 problem where this girl did something to you or said something to you . . . ’
13 Alvarez: No.
14 Larson: . . . ¿que le provocó, okay? Porque no . . . usted tiene dieciocho años. Es . . . está joven
15 todavı́a, okay? Nun . . . nunca ha hecho nada malo en su vida. Okay. Nunca ha
16 estado en un cárcel. Nunca ha . . .
17 ‘. . . that provoked you, okay? Because . . . you are eighteen years old. You are still
18 young, okay? You have never done anything bad in your life. Okay. You have
19 never been in a jail. You have never . . . ’
20 Alvarez: No.
In Extract 2 (lines 8–9, 14), Larson brings up the topic of whether there was
something in the behavior of the young woman that had provoked Alvarez,
either by word or by deed. At this point in the questioning, Alvarez denies any
such provocation. Subsequently, in the second interrogation, he will pick up on
this notion, and will use it in his defense. Five turns later Larson asks Alvarez
to do him the favor of telling him whenever he remembers something of the
incident, even if he does not want to talk about it, rather than to keep saying, “I
don’t remember.” Larson’s topic-initiation is followed up by a pointed question
regarding whether what happened that night was sexual in nature (Extract 3,
lines 1–2).
Extract 3
1 Larson: Okay. Voy a estar un poquito franco a . . . aquı́ ahora, okay? ¿Um, algo sexual pasó
2 esta noche?
3 ‘I am going to be a little frank h . . . here now, okay? Did something sexual happen
4 tonight?’
5 Alvarez: ¿Conmigo?
6 ‘With me?’
7 Larson: Um hum.
8 Alvarez: No.
9 Larson: ¿Nada sexual?
10 ‘Nothing sexual?’
11 Alvarez: Nada sexual esta noche.
12 ‘Nothing sexual tonight.’
13 Larson: Okay. ¿Qué . . . quiso que, que algo ası́ pasa?
14 ‘Okay. What . . . did you wish that, that something like that would happen?’
15 Alvarez: No.
16 Larson: Esta mujer, est . . . esta muchacha, mujer, ¿quiso conocerla?
17 ‘This woman, thi . . . this girl, woman, did you want to know her?’
18 Alvarez: No quisiera hablar más.
19 ‘I shouldn’t like to talk more.’
No further reference is made in the first interrogation to the possibly sexual

nature of the encounter between suspect and victim, and the lexical stem ‘sex-‘
and its derived forms, ‘sexual’, and ‘sexy’, are not mentioned again. Neither
is the word ‘rape’ ever uttered. Nevertheless, Larson has made his point, and
with the cat out of the bag about what the detectives suspect, Alvarez is now
aware that the line of questioning may turn in this direction once again. In fact,
it becomes the exclusive focus of the second interrogation.
3.1. Questioning strategies and forms of resistance
Overt questions regarding sexual assault come only in the last quarter of the
three-hour long interrogation session, and they are made not by Calhoun, but by
Larson, who officially is there to serve as interpreter. The questioning strategy
used by Calhoun is to get the suspect to relate chronologically his actions on
the evening of the murder, including the hours before the encounter between
Alvarez and the victim took place. A number of questions relate to information
required for the police intake sheet (e.g., correct name, height, weight, national-
ity, occupation, place of work, names of closest relations living nearby). While
most of these questions do not pose problems for the average U.S. resident
or citizen, for undocumented persons living in the U.S.A. answering questions
even as mundane as these is problematic. In the case of Carlos Alvarez, he had
already lied once to the police, giving a false name at the initial interrogation.
When asked for his social security number – in the U.S.A. one of the most basic,
multi-purpose forms of identification – he has to admit to not having one. When
asked the seemingly innocuous question, “What occupation do you have? What
do you do for work?” his response is the expression of a desire not to reveal
this (in his words, “Quisiera, si es posible, que no se supiera nada de, de mi
trabajo” ‘I would wish, if it is possible, that nothing be known about, about
my work’). It is clear from subsequent questions that he is trying to protect his

brother and cousin, with whom he shares an apartment and through whom he
has found employment, and who most likely are also undocumented workers.
He might even be attempting to protect the identity of his employer, who may
have broken the law in hiring him. Calhoun does not press the point regarding his
occupation. Following a routine strategy recommended by police interrogation
manuals (Aubry and Caputo 1980; Van Meter 1973), he works at establishing
an amicable, empathetic relationship with the suspect.
It is clear from the beginning of this interrogation session that Alvarez is not
willing to be completely forthcoming. One indication of his desire to withhold
information is his assertiveness, described above, in claiming the right to privacy
in the interest of protecting his next-of-kin. In fact, he assumes a defensive

posture at the very outset of the session by asking if his parents or guardians could
be present at the interrogation. Larson explains to him that when he informed
Alvarez of that right at the beginning of his initial interrogation, he believed
Alvarez to be a juvenile. Since Alvarez was over eighteen years of age, that right
no longer applied to him, Larson explains, by way refusing his request.
3.2. Resistance to invitations to narrate, preference for fragmented answers
One of the most salient characteristics of Alvarez’s answers to police questions is

the use of fragmented style. Fragmented answering style, characterized by brief,
unelaborated answers to questions, stands in contrast to narrative style. The re-
search of O’Barr (1982) and his colleagues (Conley, O’Barr and Lind 1978)
first brought to light the impact of such styles on listeners, specifically when
they are used by witnesses on the stand and the listeners are jurors. They found
that witnesses who answer attorneys’ questions in the lengthier, more elabo-
rated, narrative style give the impression of being more competent and socially
dynamic than are witnesses who answer in a fragmented style. Alvarez’s style of
answering the questions of Calhoun and Larson is consistently fragmented, and
in those rare instances when he does provide a narrative answer, it is merely to
repeat information he has given in previous answers, without adding anything
to what is already known. My interpretation of his unwillingness to speak in
narrative style is that this way of speaking represents a strategy of self-defense,
a continuation of the stance taken in the earlier interrogation, namely, not to say
any more than absolutely necessary. Since the police are trying to elicit narrative
types of answers, and the interrogation process is slow-going, the fragmented
answers represent a case of the violation of Grice’s (1975) maxim of quantity,
that is, they do not say enough, and therefore do not satisfy the conversational
needs of the interlocutors. Extract 4, below, vividly demonstrates the pattern of
fragmented answers that Alvarez gives.

Extract 4
1 Calhoun: Did you, ahh . . . when you were coming back to Kensington, did you see a girl?
2 Larson: Al regresar a Kensington, ¿conoció o vió una muchacha?
3 ‘Upon returning to Kensington, did you meet or did you see a girl?’
4 Alvarez: In metro?
5 Larson: Uh huh.
6 Alvarez: No.
7 Calhoun: Okay. When you got back to Kensington, you got off the metro, and where did
8 you go then?
9 Larson: Okay. Al regresar a Kensington, salió, bajó del metro, ¿dónde se fue de allá?
10 ‘Okay. Upon returning to Kensington, you went out, got off the metro, where did
11 you go from there?’
12 Alvarez: Allı́ conocı́ a una muchacha.
13 ‘There I met a girl.’
14 Larson: Okay, he said that there he met a girl.
15 Calhoun: At the metro station?
16 Larson: A la estación del . . . ¿conoció a la muchacha?
17 ‘To the metro station . . . you met a girl?’
18 Alvarez: Afuera de la de Kensington, de la estación de metro de Kensington.
19 ‘Outside of the Kensington one, the Kensington metro station.’
20 Larson: ¿Fuera de la estación, en el lote de estacionar?
21 ‘Outside of the station, in the parking lot?’
22 Alvarez: Uh huh.
23 Larson: Okay. He said in the parking lot of the metro station.
24 Calhoun: Did you talk to her?
25 Larson: ¿La habló?
26 ‘Did you talk to her?’
27 Alvarez: Sı́.
28 ‘Yes.’
29 Calhoun: Ah, that was yes?
30 Larson: Yes.
31 Calhoun: He did talk with the girl?
32 Larson: Yes.
33 Calhoun: Ah, did you walk with her?
34 Larson: ¿Andó con ella?
35 ‘Did you walk with her?’
36 Alvarez: Sı́.
37 ‘Yes.’
38 Larson: Yes.
39 Calhoun: Where did you walk to?
40 Larson: ¿Adónde andó?
41 ‘To where did you walk?’
42 Alvarez: No sé, caminé con ella como dos blocs, tres blocs.
43 ‘I don’t know, I walked with her about two blocks, three blocks.’
44 Larson: He says that he walked with her for two or three blocks.
45 Calhoun: Were you still talking with her?
46 Larson: ¿Estaba hablando o charlando con ella?
47 ‘Were you talking or chatting with her?’
48 Alvarez: Sı́.
49 ‘Yes.’
50 Larson: Yes.
51 Alvarez: O sea, sea, an . . . cuando, cuando anduve con ella, anduve, pos cuando platiqué
52 con ella, anduve platicando con ella (inaudible) un bloc conmigo.
53 ‘Or that is, that is, I wa . . . when I walked with her, well when I chatted with her,
54 when I walked and chatted with her (inaudible) one block with me.’
55 Larson: Uh huh. He says he was walking and talking with her for about a block.
56 Calhoun: And then what happened?
57 Larson: Okay. ¿Y qué pasó de allı́?
58 ‘Okay. And what happened from there?’
59 Alvarez: (Pause) Pues, pasó, pasó eso.
60 ‘(Pause) Well, it happened, that happened.’
61 Larson: Okay, he said this, this passed, that happened.
62 Calhoun: Were you arguing when you were talking with her?
63 Larson: ¿Habı́a una lucha de palabras?
64 ‘Was there a fight of words?’
65 Alvarez: No.
66 Larson: No?
67 Calhoun: Tell me what she looked like.
68 Larson: ¿Puede describir la, la muchacha?
69 ‘Can you describe the, the girl?’
70 Alvarez: Bueno, alta . . .
71 ‘Well, tall . . . ’
72 Larson: Tall.
73 Alvarez: Bueno, de pelo corto.
74 Well, short hair.’
75 Larson: Short hair.
76 Calhoun: Dark? Dark hair?
77 Alvarez: No, como, como castaño.
78 ‘No, like, like chestnut.’
79 Larson: ¿Castaño? Es un poquito más oscuro que, que café, no?
80 ‘Chestnut? Is it a little darker than coffee-colored, no?’
81 Alvarez: Sı́.
82 ‘Yes.’
83 Larson: Okay.
84 Calhoun: Dark?
85 Larson: Ah, yeah. A little darker than just plain brown.
86 Calhoun: Okay. Ah, do you remember what she was wearing?
87 Larson: ¿Se recuerda de qué llevaba ella?
88 ‘Do you remember what she was wearing?’

89 Alvarez: ¿De qué qué?
90 ‘What?’
91 Larson: ¿Qué estaba llevando . . . la ropa?
92 ‘What was she wearing . . . the clothing?’
93 Alvarez: Llevaba un short y una sudadera, I think.
94 ‘She was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, I think.’
95 Larson: ¿Una qué?
96 ‘A what?’
97 Alvarez: Sudadera.
98 ‘Sweat shirt.’
99 Larson: ¿Qué, qué es una sudadera?
100 ‘What, what is a sweat shirt?’

101 Alvarez: Como un sueter.
102 ‘Like a sweater.’
103 Larson: Okay, wearing shorts and a sweater.
104 Calhoun: Do you remember the colors?
105 Larson: ¿Los colores, se recuerda?
106 ‘The colors, do you remember?’
107 Alvarez: Eran oscuros.
108 ‘They were dark.’
109 Larson: Dark.
110 Calhoun: Okay. Was she carrying anything?
111 Larson: ¿Estaba llevando algo con ella?
112 ‘Was she carrying something with her?’
113 Alvarez: No . . . Una mochila, creo.
114 ‘No . . . A knapsack, I believe.’
115 Larson: ¿Una mochila?
116 ‘A knapsack?’
117 Alvarez: Una mochila, um hum . . .
118 ‘A knapsack, um hum.’
119 Larson: Okay, ah, she was carrying a bag.
120 Calhoun: Okay. You’re talking with her . . . did she have anything else with her?
121 Larson: ¿Ah . . . mientras que estaba, o estuvo ha . . . hablando con ella, ahh, tenı́a ella algo
122 más . . . con ella . . . a, además de este po . . . pochila?
123 ‘While you were, or you were ta-. . . talking with her did she have something
124 more . . . with her . . . be-. . . besides this po-. . . ”pochila”?’
125 Alvarez: Tenı́a una, una patineta.
126 ‘She had a, a skateboard.’
127 Larson: Una patineta, ¿qué es una patineta?
128 ‘A skateboard, what is a skateboard?’
129 Alvarez: Es con lo que andan los, los muchachos.
130 ‘It’s what the, the kids go around with.’
131 Larson: Okay.
132 Alvarez: En las calles.
133 ‘In the streets.’

134 Larson: Okay. She had a skateboard.
The police need a description of the victim from a suspect to make sure that the
person they have in custody is a potential suspect. In other words, they need to
match the appearance of the crime victim with the description given of her by the
suspected perpetrator of the crime. Physical descriptions naturally lend them-
selves to narrative types of characterizations. Most adults would provide details
of height, weight or build, hair length and color, color of skin when relevant.
When Calhoun says (line 67), “Tell me what she looked like”, he is requesting
a physical description that includes some of these details. When the request for
a description fails, he has to work harder at obtaining the information he wants,

and resorts to asking a series of specific questions to elicit these characteriza-
tions. For example, in providing a description of someone’s clothing, one would
include color in referring to particular items of apparel, but Alvarez does not. His
minimal answers force Calhoun to generate additional questions about a given
referent. Without such prompts, Alvarez’s descriptions are inadequate for Cal-
houn’s purposes. The suspect is not being totally cooperative conversationally,
but then he has a reason not to be.
Perhaps the most glaringly uninformative answer to a question that was
intended to produce a narrative reply is the one in response to Calhoun’s (line
56), “And then what happened?” Calhoun’s expectation is an account of the
attack on the woman. Alvarez’s answer, “Well, it happened, that happened,” in
its total lack of information, reveals nothing about what he did or she did after
they had walked together for a block. In its substantive vacuousness it says a
great deal, however: it indicates that the subject is a highly sensitive one for the
suspect. Seeing that Alvarez is not willing at this point to describe the incident
on his own accord, Calhoun changes gears and asks a specific question about
the nature of their conversation during the one-block walk, namely, had Alvarez
been arguing with her. He is successful in eliciting a “Yes” response.
4. The linguistic construction of violence

The scenario that the police attempt to construct together with the suspect is that
he tried to pick up a young woman a block away from the metro station, and that
she rejected his advances. Calhoun repeatedly asks Alvarez if the girl pushed
him or yelled at him, implying that such actions on her part could have provoked
him to attack her. To the question as to whether she had pushed him, he replies,
“Un poco” ‘A little’. Later in the interrogation, however, he reveals that she tried
to push him away from her, jabbing him in the stomach with her elbow, only after
he had grabbed her by the throat from behind and flashed a knife in front of her
face. So, while in fact she had pushed him, the pushing was not what provoked
him to violence, but rather came in response to the violent act that he had initiated
against her. Nevertheless, the suggestion of the detective that perhaps she had
pushed him, and that this in turn might have made him “a little furious” (which
he denies, saying that he had not been angry, but simply depressed and feeling
rejected because the girl had rebuffed him, telling him to get away from her)
will be used by Alvarez in subsequent go-arounds. He begins to incorporate into
his story the fact that she had hit him in the stomach with her arm, and repeats
this detail in the numerous tellings that the police elicit from him.
The linguistic construction of violence 85
The sexual inuendo is introduced gradually by the two detectives, with ques-
tions as to whether Alvarez wanted to go home with her, wanted to spend the
night with her, whether he liked her, and whether he thought she was pretty. To
most of these questions his initial answers are in the negative. Several times he
denies forcefully that she was pretty, and to the question, “Did you like her?” he
answers: “No, no mucho. Pues, pues, fue una mujer y . . . pero no, no me gustó
a tal grado como para haberla asesinado” ‘No, not much. Well, well, she was a
woman and . . . but no, I didn’t like her to such a degree as to have murdered
her’. This is a very strange comment, particularly in light of the fact he had
already confessed to the murder.
The police detectives try to find out what he had said to her during that one-
block walk during which, according to Alvarez, they were “chatting”. Alvarez is
completely reticent about the content of that interchange. He eventually divulges,
after several attempts by Calhoun to find out the nature of the conversation
between them, that he had asked her about how to get to a certain street, and that
she was helpful enough to give him directions. But immediately after that he
began saying things to her which put her off, and which prompted her to tell him
to leave her alone. He never does reveal what sorts of things he said to her that
would have produced such a reaction. It is conjectured that he was using pick-
up lines, in Spanish known as piropos. These range in content from relatively
innocuous, flattering comments to highly offensive lascivious remarks, often
about the woman’s body (Achugar 2002; Fuentes 2001).
Upon being told by her to go away, he reports, he grabbed her by the arm,
then put his hand around her throat, and pulled out a knife – which he claims
to have found somewhere in the street, earlier in the day – and held it in front
of her face. His explanation for pulling out the knife is that he simply wanted
to scare her, because she had made him feel depressed and rejected. Once he
had her in his grip and the knife close to her face, she struggled to free herself
and in the process, “threw herself to the ground”, a strange reaction when one is
trying to get away from an attacker. It is more likely that either he knocked her
to the ground or else that she fell in the struggle. Nevertheless, in the numerous
times that he was asked to describe his actions and those of the girl, Alvarez
never waivered from this version of the story, as unlikely as it may sound to an
impartial observer.
Alvarez several times describes sticking the knife into the girl. At first he
admits to only one stab, but after repeated questioning carried out in cyclic
fashion, he acknowledges two stabs, and after further challenges from Calhoun,
entertains the possibility of having stabbed her three times, but no more than
that. An examination of her body revealed multiple stab wounds.
Why did he stab her, Calhoun asks? Alvarez’s answer is that she screamed,
which frightened him. He stabbed her to stop the screaming. When Calhoun
asks him if her screams were “very loud”, Alvarez responds with a highly mit-
igated characterization of them, “Más o menos” ‘More or less.’ He thereby is
minimizing the terror the girl must have been experiencing, and thereby verbally
reducing the amount of harm he was inflicting on her.
Whereas Alvarez is not answering the questions in any way that could be
considered to be narrative style, he does provide enough information to confirm
the admission he made at the first interrogation, that he had stabbed the young
woman twice. And he has been told by Calhoun that she died, which comes
as devastating news to him, since he realizes the implications of this for him.
Yet whenever either of the detectives alludes to a sexual motivation for his
violent behavior, he denies the assertion. The section below presents evidence
for the linguistic construction of attempted rape effectuated by the police, and
the steadfast rejection by Alvarez of any such characterizations of his behavior.
4.1. Constructing attempted rape; strategies of denial
Calhoun’s strategy for eliciting a confession to attempted rape is to gather bits

of incriminating facts from the suspect, facts which in and of themselves do
not necessarily indicate sexual violence, but which when viewed in their totality
would point to such a conclusion. Alvarez, despite his youth and inexperience
with the U.S. criminal justice system, can follow the drift of Calhoun’s ques-
tions, and makes every attempt to counter the implications. Even the supposition
expressed by the detective that Alvarez must have been “upset” by the girl’s re-
jection of him is dismissed by the suspect, partly because Larson incorrectly
rendered the adjective ‘upset’ as enojado ‘angry’, aggravating the illocutionary
force of Calhoun’s adjective. Alvarez flatly denies having felt angry, replying
with, “No, estaba espantado, asustado” ‘No, I was frightened, scared.’ By por-
traying himself as ‘frightened’ and ‘scared’, he is presenting himself not as the

aggressor, but in a sense as a victim, and therefore not to be blamed. Something
that she did frightened him. What Alvarez overlooks is that his feelings of fear
come as a result of the girl’s screams, and the girl began screaming only after he
began the cycle of physical violence: grabbing her by the neck, and brandishing
a knife in front of her face. Her screams were heightened by the stabbing itself,
and this in turn frightened him even further, he told the detectives. Once he
started stabbing her, according to Alvarez, and her body lost the strength to re-
sist him, he was faced with what to do with her. At this point he began dragging
her behind a nearby hedge, very likely for the purpose of hiding her body from
the view of passersby.
The core of the interrogation component focusing on the theme of attempted

rape deals with how the suspect moved the victim’s body, and where he moved it
to from which starting point. Calhoun zeroes in on whether Alvarez was pulling
on the girl’s clothes or holding onto a part of her body as he was dragging her.
He also wants to know the position she was lying in as she was being dragged.
It is not clear to an analyst, at this point in the questioning, why the distinction
is an important one. Alvarez first insists that he dragged her only by the arm
(el brazo). Larson, the faulty interpreter that he is, incorrectly renders brazo as
‘blouse’. Since the issue of whether she was being pulled on the ground by her
clothing or by a body part is a crucial point for Calhoun in his interpretation
of the events, this seemingly small interpreting error causes much confusion,
especially since the ‘sweat shirt’ the girl was wearing was already rendered in-
correctly as ‘sweater’. One can presume that Calhoun, having seen the body and
the clothing of the victim, would have known at the time of the interrogation what
she really had been wearing, and could disentangle this ever more convoluted
knot of contradictions. By the end of the interrogation Alvarez has admitted to
dragging the victim by her waist, pulling her by the shorts. He alters his story
minimally, as the police point out inconsistencies between his portrayal of events
and the physical evidence that they report to have found at the crime scene.
In an effort to clarify the sequence of events that constitute the murder and
what they believe was an attempted rape, Calhoun draws a diagram for Alvarez,
asking him to help pencil in the key actors of the scenario, and the key physical
objects in the locale where the events took place (e.g., shrubs, a tree, and so
on). Calhoun wants Alvarez to show him on the sheet of paper where he stabbed
the girl, where he dragged her to, and how he moved her from point A to point
B. Larson, the interpreter, in the meanwhile, increasingly becomes an active
interrogator in the speech event, principally by tagging his own questions onto
those of Calhoun as he works to interpret them into Spanish.
Calhoun uses the diagram as a way of pulling the story from Alvarez, since
the routine interrogation procedure he had been using was turning out to be
unsuccessful in budging Alvarez from a version of the events that did not mesh
with the scenario that he, Calhoun had reconstructed from the physical evidence.
The questioning goes on for quite a while with the diagram being drafted and
redrafted as they speak.At one point, Larson asksAlvarez to reenact the dragging
there in the interrogation room, volunteering to act as a live mannequin in place
of the victim. The detective apparently is down on the floor, asking him to show
him how he carried her, using a typical indirect speech act of request, “¿Puede
mostrarme para que entendemos cómo la llevó?” ‘Can you show me, so that we
can understand how you carried her?’ Alvarez’s reply is a flat refusal: “No, no
puedo” ‘No, I can’t.’He will not go along with the game. It may be too disturbing
to do the reenactment, less than twenty-four hours after the real event. Another
possible reason for his unwillingness to cooperate with Larson is that of the two
detectives, he is the more aggressive. It is Larson who usually asks the overtly
challenging questions. Calhoun is much more low-keyed and empathetic in his
interrogation approach. The two may simply be following a “good cop/bad cop”
routine.
Alvarez shows resistance to the questioning by continuing to refer to the
crimes with vague, unspecific expressions. While helping Calhoun draw a map
of the crime scene, he is asked to identify where the street is in relation to the
parking lot, and to locate the bushes and trees that played a significant role in
the events. Larson at one point asks Alvarez to identify a mark he has made on
the map. Alvarez’s answers to Larson’s questions demonstrate an unwillingness
to name his crimes, even though he is willing to provide a certain amount
of information on one of them. Ironically, the suspect is merely capitalizing on
verbal mechanisms that the detective himself had provided for him. It was Larson
who had first used the term ‘problem’ to refer to Alvarez’s violent actions, and
the suspect adopted this term and used it in subsequent questioning, as a way of
not incriminating himself.26 Extract 5 shows that Larson continues to refer to the
euphemism ‘problem’, this time coupling it with the murder weapon, ‘knife’.
The notion that Alvarez had had a problem with the knife conveys the impression
that there was something problematic about the knife, that it was giving Alvarez
trouble. Alvarez, therefore, is made to look like the inadvertant, unfortunate
victim of knife troubles. Just as uninformative as the noun ‘problem’ is the
neutral demonstrative pronoun esto ‘this.’ Its lack of specificity allows Alvarez
to protect himself, in that by using it he is able to avoid giving a name to the illegal
acts that are being hinted at. In its vagueness, the word esto encompasses both
the stabbing itself and the interaction between assailant and victim immediately
preceding it. Its use, therefore, is a form of resistance to a line of questioning that
the detainee knows could be damaging to the case that the detective is attempting
to build against him.

Extract 5
1 Larson: Y esto aquı́?
2 ‘And this here?’
3 What is this here?
4 Alvarez: Esto, aquı́ fue donde, donde pasó esto.
5 ‘This, here was where, where this happened.’
6 Larson: Okay, this “x” you’ve marked on your drawing is, is where you had the problem
7 with the knife, where you stuck her?
8 Alvarez: Sı́, aquı́ fue el problema.
9 ‘Yes, here was the problem.’
The episode within the overall interrogation speech event that can be clearly
demarcated as the overt beginning of the accusation of sexual assault comes
after the crime scene map is completed. A ‘pre-accusation’ (a prefatory an-
nouncement preceding the accusation) is uttered by Calhoun (line 1), followed
by a warning from him that Alvarez had better tell the truth. And then suddenly,
unexpectedly, a reference to the victim’s bra, and its irregular placement on her
(Extract 6, line 10).
Extract 6
1 Calhoun: Okay. I have a tough question for you, tough question.
2 Larson: Ah, tenemos una pregunta bien difı́cil.
3 ‘Ah, we have a very difficult question.’
4 Alvarez: Um hum.
5 Calhoun: But the truth is necessary.
6 Larson: Pero es necesario que sabemos la verdad.
7 ‘But it is necessary that we know the truth.’
8 Alvarez: Sı́.
9 ‘Yes.’
10 Calhoun: When you left her there, her bra was up. ¿Verdad?
11 ‘True?’
12 Alvarez: Sı́.
13 ‘Yes.’
14 Larson: ¿Al dejarla allı́, la ropa de ella fue . . . estaba bien levantada?
15 ‘Upon leaving her there, her clothing was . . . was raised up a lot?’
16 Alvarez: Uh hum.
17 Larson: ¿Verdad?
18 ‘True?’
19 Alvarez: Sı́.
20 ‘Yes.’
21 Larson: Yes.
22 Calhoun: Ah, how did it get that way?
23 Larson: ¿Cómo llegó a ser eso?
24 ‘How did that come to be?’

25 Alvarez: Es que, cuando ella estaba aquı́, yo, yo la agarré del sueter de aquı́ y la agarré
26 del brazo y entonces cuando yo la jalé se le alzó la ropa. Y, y la, la agarré del
27 brazo y la agarré del sueter y la, la jalé ası́.
28 ‘It’s that, when she was here, I, I grabbed her by the sweater from here and I
29 grabbed her by the arm and then when I pulled her, her clothing came up. And,
30 and I grabbed her, her by the arm and I grabbed her by the sweater, and I pulled
31 her, her like that.’
32 Larson: He says when he was pulling her he was, he had grabbed her by the arm and by
33 the sweater, and it came up while he was grabbing her . . . or pulling her.
34 Calhoun: Okay. Another tough question, Carlos.
35 Larson: Okay. Otra pregunta muy difı́cil.
36 ‘Okay. Another very difficult question.’
37 Calhoun: Her dress and underwear were pulled down, almost all the way to her feet.
38 Larson: Okay. Los pantalones y también los pantalones anteriores estaban bajadas hasta
27
39 las, las tornillos?
40 ‘Okay. The pants and the forward pants were lowered to the, the screws.’
41 Alvarez: Um hum.
42 Larson: Okay. ¿Cómo llegó a ser eso?
43 ‘Okay. How did that come to be?’
44 Alvarez: Cuando la movı́ a ella, la jalé de la ropa también . . .
45 ‘When I moved her, I also pulled her by the clothing . . . ’
46 Larson: ¿usted la, la jaló a la ropa?
47 ‘You pulled on the, the clothing?’
48 Alvarez: Porque cuando ella, ella la, la llevé y la puse . . . y ella dijo que “no” y la, la agarré
49 de la ropa y la jalé, cuando le jalé, cuando la puse allı́ le jalé la ropa, y ella dijo
50 que “no” y, y sacó sangre por la boca.
51 ‘Because when she, she, I carried her, her and I put her . . . and she said “no” and I
52 grabbed her, her by the clothing and I pulled her, when I pulled on her, when I put
53 her there I pulled on her clothing and she said “no” and blood came out of her
54 mouth.’
The pre-accusation performed by Calhoun, which precedes the accusatory declar-

ative utterance containing the critical lexical item ‘bra’, functions to orient Al-
varez thematically to sexual activities. It does so because the word ‘bra’ is
charged with sexual innuendo: not merely an item of apparel, it is a garment
that covers women’s breasts, which both in European-American and Latin Amer-
ican mainstream cultures are associated primarily with sexuality. For this reason,
Calhoun’s statement that the victim’s bra was pulled up carries with it the ac-
cusatory implication that Alvarez, who was struggling with the young woman,
was in some way responsible for the bra’s being out of place, the underlying
implication being that Alvarez wanted to see her naked breasts.
Alvarez’s minimal response can be interpreted either as a back channel, indi-
cating that he was following what Calhoun was saying, or it can be understood to
be agreement with the detective. In and of itself it remains ambiguous. For this
reason, Larson (line 17) follows up Alvarez’s minimal response with a request
for agreement, and Alvarez cooperates, with a minimalist “Sı́”. Since Alvarez is
not forthcoming and does not volunteer any further information, Calhoun must
press him (line 22), about how the bra came to be there.
Alvarez’s answer (lines 25–27) is basically a repetition of statements he had
made earlier, adding one piece of new information, se le alzó la ropa ‘her cloth-
ing came up’. The grammatical construction of this phrase is similar to the sorts
of “unaccusative constructions” found in the testimony of the college student ac-
cused of sexual assault in Ehrlich (2001). This sort of syntactic construction has
been shown to be used by Spanish speakers in Costa Rica (Berk-Seligson 1983)
as well as in the U.S.A. (specifically in courtroom testimony) as a mechanism of

blame-avoidance (Berk-Seligson 1990). By using this sort of construction, and
capitalizing on the grammar of non-agency, Alvarez is resisting any possible
interpretation of Calhoun’s that he pulled her bra up deliberately.
Calhoun uses a pre-accusation a second time (line 34), with the same type of
wording (“Another tough question”), which serves as a warning that the ques-
tion may not be one that the suspect would wish to answer easily or willingly.
Again, it is not a question, as Calhoun claims it to be, but a statement, about
the victim’s dress and underpants being pulled down, almost to her feet. Unfor-
tunately, Larson mangles the rendition of this statement in Spanish, mistaking
ropa interior ‘underwear’ for ropa anterior ‘previous clothing’ and rendering
‘ankles’ as tornillos ‘screws’, no doubt because of its phonetic resemblance to
tobillos ‘ankles.’ It is amazing that Alvarez can understand the question. Ap-
parently his first-hand knowledge of the context, that is, the situation involving
the victim and himself, gives him sufficient background to piece together what
Larson is getting at.
The two accusatory insinuations portray a women who is naked, from the
breasts down to her feet. Yet this is not said explicitly at this point in the ques-
tioning, it is only implied. Much later in the interrogation, it will be enunciated
quite bluntly.
This time it is Larson who acts entirely as if he were a police interrogator,
repeating the question that Calhoun had asked after the first implicit accusation,
“How did that come to be?”
Alvarez’s explanation is not very informative, since it essentially repeats
what he had said in a nearby answer turn. The only new elements he adds to his
previous explanation (that he had been pulling her and dragging her, including
pulling on her clothing) is that she kept saying “no” during this episode, and
that blood was coming out of her mouth.
4.1.1. Repetition as denial and resistance

The most striking aspect of the detainee’s approach to handling the questions
of the detectives, besides answering them in fragmented fashion, is the use of
repetition. He uses both “self-repetition” and “allo-repetition” (repetition of
others), to use a distinction of Deborah Tannen’s (1989: 54). He also uses exact
repetition as well as paraphrase (both of his own words and those of others).
Tannen’s review of the numerous functions of repetition in conversation is worth
reproducing here. Comparing its uses in the creation of meaning in conversation,
she says (Tannen 1989: 51):
. . . repetition also functions on the interactional level of talk: accomplishing social

goals, or simply managing the business of conversation. Some functions . . . in-
clude: getting or keeping the floor, showing listenership, providing back-channel
response, stalling, gearing up to answer or speak, humor and play, savoring and
showing appreciation of a good line or a good joke, persuasion (what Koch 1983
calls “presentation of proof”), linking one speaker’s ideas to another’s, ratify-
ing another’s contribution (including another’s ratification), and including in an
interaction a person who did not hear a previous utterance. In other words, repe-
tition not only ties parts of discourse to other parts, but bonds participants to the
discourse and to each other, linking individual speakers in a conversation and in
relationships.
Of Alvarez’s numerous self-repetitions, both isolated lexical items and phrases,
some seem to be stalling devices and many function as strategies of persuasion.
At the same time, however, they function to deny certain actions and to resist the
efforts of the interrogators to implicate him in them. In short, most of Alvarez’s
repetitions are “repetitions of denial and resistance”. Such repetitions can em-
power a detainee with a strategy for self-defense in the face of a situation of
asymmetrical power relationships, where the one being questioned is generally
the one lacking in power in the interaction. As will be shown below, the use of
nearly word-for-word repetition by a detainee, with barely any new information
added to an answer, is a way for a detainee to avoid talking about a topic that
s/he wishes to circumvent. By repeating his or her answers, a detainee gives
the illusion of behaving in a cooperative manner with the authorities: s/he is
answering their questions. The detainee keeps on talking (Van Meter 1973), and
that is one of the strategies of police interrogators, namely, keep the talk going.
However, when the talk consists almost entirely of repetitions – both exact and
paraphrased – and the replies do not always meaningfully answer the questions,
then it can be said that repetition is functioning as a tool of resistance. As a
resistance mechanism, it can serve to deny an accusation.
One of the most frequently repeated themes in Alvarez’s answers is that he
grabbed the young woman and pulled out his knife only because he wanted to
frighten her, not to hurt her. It should be noted that early in the interrogation,
Calhoun had suggested to him this possibility (see Extract 1), and so the wording
of the answers below should be seen as an allo-repetition of Calhoun’s words.
Thus, Calhoun has inadvertantly provided him with a defense strategy, and
Alvarez latches onto it as a way of defending himself, although in so doing,
he admits more and more. The following extracts comprise question/answer
sequences in which this theme is reiterated by Alvarez; they occur at different
points in the interrogation.
Extract 7
1 Larson (interpreting for Calhoun): ¿Le pegó a ella cuando ella le hizo sentir furioso?
2 ‘Did you hit her when she made you feel furious?’
3 Alvarez: No, no le pegué, pero la agarré. La agarré, la abracé con la mano, porque la
4 querı́a espantar.
5 ‘No, I didn’t hit her, but I grabbed her. I embraced her arm with my hand, because
6 I wanted to frighten her.’
7 Larson: Espantar, ¿qué quiere decir ‘espantar’?
8 ‘Frighten, what does ‘frighten’ mean?’
9 Alvarez: Pues la, la agarré con la mano por el cuello.
10 ‘Well I grabbed her, her by the neck with my hand.’
11 Larson: Um hum.
12 Alvarez: Y, y, y le saqué el cuchillo. Le enseñé el cuchillo para que se espantara . . . para
13 que (inaudible) para que se, se asustara.
14 ‘And, and, and I drew the knife on her. I showed her the knife so that she would
15 be frightened . . . so that (inaudible) so that she would be scared.’
Calhoun, in trying to elicit the story of how the incident began, asks Alvarez
to tell him what he had said to the young woman when he approached her. He
extracts from a reticent Alvarez that after asking her for street directions, he told
her that he liked her, and then she told him to go away. He then told her that he
did not like her, and feeling rejected and depressed, grabbed her and pulled the
knife on her.
Extract 8
1 Calhoun: Okay, and do you remember what she said back?
2 Larson: ¿Se recuerda usted qué dijo ella a usted?
3 ‘Do you remember what she told you?’
4 Alvarez: No, creo que fue cuando la, cuando me acerqué a ella y la agarré y la espanté
5 con, con el cuchillo.
6 ‘No, I believe that was when, when I approached her and I grabbed her and I
7 frightened her with, with the knife.’

8 Larson: Okay, he believes that’s when he got close to her and grabbed her.
9 Calhoun: Okay. How did you grab her?
10 Larson: ¿Cómo le agarró?
11 ‘How did you grab her?’
12 Alvarez: La agarré por el cuello y le enseñé el cuchillo.
13 ‘I grabbed her by the neck and I showed her the knife.’
Somewhat later Calhoun asks Alvarez to explain to him in greater detail how
he held the knife in relation to the young woman. To this, Alvarez replies, “Con
esta mano la agarré ası́ y se lo puse en frente el cuchillo en la cara” ‘With this
hand I grabbed her like this and I put the knife in her face.’ And when Larson
asks whether the knife was far away or close to her, Alvarez repeats, “O sea, la
agarré con el brazo por el cuello y, y le pu . . . puse el cuchillo delante de la
cara” ‘That is, I grabbed her with my arm by the neck and, and I pu . . . put the
knife in front of her face.’
Other themes that are expressed by Alvarez in nearly an identical fashion
throughout the questioning are (1) the woman hit him in the stomach with her
arm/elbow; (2) then threw herself to the ground, screaming; (3) he knelt beside
her on the ground, grabbed her by the throat to stop her screaming, and stabbed
her because (a) she wouldn’t stop screaming, and (b) this frightened, scared him;
(4) he dragged her along the ground, by the waist, pulling her by her clothes and
by her arm, over to a tree to hide her behind it; (5) he did this to her because she
had rejected his advances and consequently made him feel bad and depressed.
Each of these themes is probed into by the police many times over in cyclic
fashion during the three hours of questioning, in accordance with routine police
interrogation procedure, and each time Alvarez uses almost identical phrasing
to describe the events and the scene.
Interestingly, often these unvarying descriptions represent illogical, defective
responses to the questions they are intended to answer. They become rote, pat
phrases that the suspect can pull out whenever he needs an answer. For example,
he never provides a satisfactory answer to Calhoun’s question as to why he was
kneeling over the girl. Why hadn’t he just run away after she “threw herself to
the ground” out of fear of him, screaming? If he was frightened by her screams,
why didn’t he run away? What would induce him to kneel down beside her on the
ground?Alvarez’s answer to this is just a repetition of how scared he felt, and how
he wanted her to stop screaming. His response leaves the linguistic investigator
as dissatisfied with the explanation as were the two police detectives. Alvarez’s
behavior did not make sense, given his overwhelming state of fear.
The statement that he felt frightened and scared recurs more frequently than
perhaps any theme. Partly it is because the police repeatedly ask him if he
felt angry at the girl, if that is why he stabbed her. Alvarez steadfastly holds
to his “contrasting version” (Drew 1992) of his state mind: he was not angry,
he was merely frightened. These repudiations of the police allegations are car-
ried out with consistency and firmness. He never hesitates (his are not delayed
responses), and generally begins his reply with the negative marker, “No”, fol-
lowed by, a description of how he felt: mal ‘bad’, asustado, espantado ‘scared,
frightened’. He is very clear about this, and does not want to be accused of
acting out of anger. Thus, he remains resistant to the end about this point, and
does so by using the very same words to create his “competing version” (Drew
1992) of the story.
Exposing one’s hand: a final police tactic 95
5. Exposing one’s hand: a final police tactic
Throughout most of the interrogation the two police detectives are gradual and
indirect in their approach to building up an accusation of attempted sexual
assault. However, there comes a point toward the end of the session when they
lay their cards on the table, and tell Alvarez quite explicitly what their alternative
version of the story is.
At a point midway through the interrogation Larson asks, as he had done
once before, at the first interrogation, if Alvarez had wanted to “know” the girl
in the Biblical sense – in the sense of having sexual relations with her – and
defines the word for him. Alvarez flatly denies that this had been his desire. He
does not like the word ‘sexual’ to be used in describing his desires or his actions.
Nevertheless, much later in the questioning he admits that when he tried to “get
to know her” it had crossed his mind that after “chatting” on the street maybe
she would be willing to spend the night with him, that he would have liked to
make love to her once they had gotten to know each other. He makes the point
of saying that he would never go to bed with someone he didn’t know, and that
he was not one to frequent cabarets – which in Mexico are topless dance bars or
strip-tease clubs – or to pay women to sleep with him. It is quite clear from his
remarks, however, that he considered “getting to know” a woman as something
that could happen in the span of a short walk down a street late at night.
In the last segment of the interrogation Calhoun asks Larson to, “Tell him
that, ah, as a man, I think he wanted to have sex with her,” to which Alvarez
replies, “No, yo nunca (inaudible)” ‘No, I never (inaudible).’ Unfortunately,
Larson renders ‘wanted’ as quiso ‘attempted to, tried to.’ This is predictable for
a non-native speaker of Spanish because ‘wanted’ is the past tense form of the
English verb, and so Larson uses the preterite tense form of the verb querer
‘want.’ However, the verb querer has a special meaning in the preterite: it means
‘tried to’ or ‘attempted to’. To say the equivalent of ‘wanted to’ in Spanish would
involve using the imperfect tense (querı́a). It is likely that Larson’s rendition,
quiso is understood by Alvarez as meaning ‘you tried to’ have sex with her,
rather than ‘you wanted to’. In the case of an attempted rape charge, this is
a crucial difference. The preterite form quiso in the utterance in which it was
placed constitutes a direct accusation of attempted rape. It is no wonder that
Alvarez so flatly denies it.
In constructing the accusation of attempted rape, Calhoun points out the
scratches on one of Alvarez’s hands. He interprets their presence as signs that
the victim had scratched him as she was struggling to fend him off. Alvarez flatly
rejects this possibility, explaining that the scratches were the result of putting
his hand in the pocket that held the knife (i.e., he claims that he cut himself with
the knife). Calhoun rejects this theory, telling him that the marks left by a cut
look very different from scrape marks.
After this out-and-out dispute, Calhoun pulls out yet another revelation: that
they, the police, had found something else on Alvarez’s hands, besides scrapes –
something that smelled like vaginal fluid. When Larson explains that this sub-
stance comes from “where we do pee-pee”, Alvarez vehemently denies any
wrongdoing of this nature, saying, “No, nunca toqué allı́” ‘No, I never touched
there’. Calhoun, by now, openly confronting Alvarez with supposedly known
facts, points out that there were fingerprints of Alvarez’s on her legs. To this
he replies that because he pulled on her pants, perhaps he accidentally brushed
against her legs, but that he “never, never touched the, that part of her body.”
Finally, Larson, not mincing his words and always the more aggressive inter-
rogator, says to Alvarez: “Okay. Bueno lo que estamos diciendo, Carlos, okay . . .
es que nosotros creemos que lo que pasó es que usted quiso tener o hacer amor
con ella” ‘Okay. Well, what we are saying, Carlos, okay . . . is we believe that
what happened is that you wanted to have or to make love with her’. Oddly, Al-
varez responds with a minimal, “Um hum,” not denying Larson’s assertion. This
is followed by another challenging statement from Larson, that he and Calhoun
believe that perhaps this happened because she didn’t want to make love with
Alvarez. When asked by Larson if this is true, Alvarez denies it, saying, “No,
porque yo nunca le hablé de hacer eso” ‘No, because I never talked to her about
doing that’, that is, he continues, he never told her that he had any desire to
make love to her. This is interesting because it implies that he believes that only
by saying something explicit to the woman about wanting to make love to her
would it count as an expression of his desire to do so. Apparently he believes
that some sort of speech act is required (e.g., a request for permission to have
sex) for a man to be considered to have made a sexual advance. Actions without
words would not be sufficient, from his standpoint.
At the very end of the session Calhoun asks Alvarez to tell the truth – saying
that Alvarez had told the truth about the stabbing, but that it was time to tell the
truth about everything. At this Alvarez says that he does not know what “ev-
erything” refers to, because he has told everything. Nevertheless, the detectives
press him about whether he had gotten angry at the woman, Larson telling him
that getting angry would have been all right for him to do – thereby mitigat-
ing the gravity of the crime. One more time Alvarez denies having felt anger.
Through the probing of the detectives, he admits that during the event he knew
that he was doing something bad, and when asked by Larson, “What is, what,
what was the . . . this something bad?” all that he was willing to say was, “Pues,
agarrarla, enseñarle el cuchillo” ‘Well, grabbing her, showing her the knife’.
This is far less than what the detectives were trying to elicit from him. Therefore
Conclusions 97
at this point they give up, and bring the interrogation to a halt, although not
without first asking Alvarez if he had ever been to see a psychiatrist. Noting
burn marks on his neck and chest, they must suspect a history of physical abuse.
6. Conclusions
The case of The People v. Alvarez demonstrates that detainees undergoing police
interrogation, even when subjected to what appellate courts deem to be “coer-
cive” interrogation techniques, have within their power the ability to resist such
coercive questioning tactics. By limiting themselves to fragmented answers and
avoiding elaborated, narrative style, and by making ample use of self-repetition
and allo-repetition, detainees suspected of felonies – such as attempted rape –
to a great degree can thwart the efforts of the police to force confessions from
them. The implication of this finding is that even under coercion, suspects can
be considered to hold at least some measure of power over their interrogators,
and that is the power of resistance. This is a finding at variance with much of the
research based on trial testimony, most of which focuses entirely on the power
to control testimony that is in the hands of the interrogator.
One especially interesting finding emerging from the present analysis is that
those being interrogated use as their tools of resistance the very tactics provided
them by their interrogators. The common tactic used by police detectives of not
naming the crime about which they are questioning a detainee, and referring to
it as “the problem” or the “situation” can be picked up by the detainee to avoid
mentioning the act for which s/he is being held. Similarly, when police detectives
suggest a motive for the purported act of a detainee (e.g., anger at the victim),
and behave sympathetically toward them, telling them that it is understandable
for someone in the suspect’s situation to have been provoked into committing a
serious crime, the detainee can exploit the suggested motive and capitalize on
it during subsequent questioning, using it as a defensive strategy. Thus, verbal

tactics used by the interrogator can be seen as potentially capable of subversion
by the interrogated, serving the latter’s own strategic interactional needs. At the
same time, the interrogator provides the suspect with euphemisms, which make
it easier for him to extract a confession.
In the particular case of Carlos Alvarez, no matter how many times the
police suggest that it was anger that motivated him to stab a young woman,
the suggestion does not have the perlocutionary effect on the suspect that they
intend it to have. He does not adopt it as a motive for his violent behavior. To the
end he remains resistant to the notion that he was angry at the victim, admitting
only to feelings of rejection and depression.
Since there was sufficient evidence of attempted rape to uphold a conviction

on appeal, what then accounts for Carlos Alvarez’s persistent resistance to the
police detectives’ accusation against him? And why would he confess to murder
but resist the accusation of sexual wrongdoing? Several possibilities suggest
themselves, all of them at the level of conjecture, but all of them reasonable.
Perhaps it is a combination of them that accounts for the seemingly paradoxical
behavior of the suspect.
One reason why he may have resisted the accusation of sexual wrongdoing
is that this was the crime that he felt most guilty about, and probably the one
he had in mind when he began to behave in a menacing way toward the young
woman. It is unlikely that he was planning to murder anyone that night, but it is
very likely that, in his drunken state, he was looking for a woman to have sex
with. From his perspective, his crime was attempting to force himself sexually
on this unfortunate woman who crossed his path. The murder was unintended;
it happened to result from a sexual crime gone awry. In fact, in his drunken
state, Alvarez was unaware that he had done so much damage to her that she had
died. The shock and grief he expressed at the first interrogation when the police
informed him that the victim had died are evidence that he was not thinking
clearly or perceiving the situation accurately when he ran away and left the young
woman hidden behind some bushes. When the police gave him a seemingly
excusable reason for attacking her, namely, that perhaps she had done something
to hurt him, he seized on this rationale, and used it for the rest of the interrogation.
The police, by seemingly ameliorating Alvarez’s responsibility for the violence,
gave him a false sense of security, that is, they gave him the impression that
the attack on the girl was understandable in the light of her behavior toward
him, and that therefore what he did was not so terribly reprehensible. Thus, if
stabbing the girl could be excused by the police as a justifiable action on his part,
then what remained to be held accountable for was the attempted rape, which
he may have felt was a crime and which left him feeling very bad about himself.
From this perspective, he fits into the category of ‘denier’, a term proposed by
Scully (1990: 38) to describe convicted rapists who “admitted that rape is usually
impermissible, but argued that in their particular case, there were justifications
that made their behavior appropriate, if not right.” Deniers can be distinguished
from ‘admitters’ in this respect.
Another possible explanation for why Alvarez denied the attempted sexual
assault is that a second charge, added on to the murder charge, would result in a
longer prison sentence if he were convicted of both. Perhaps he was not aware
of prison sentence norms in the U.S.A., and if not, he would not have known
that for murder he could get either the death penalty or life in prison without
the possibility of parole, but that for the crime of rape he could be sentenced to
Conclusions 99
only three-to-eight years in prison by a state court. The disparity in sentences

for the two crimes is quite sharp in the state in which he was living. In Mexico
City, in contrast, the difference in sentencing for simple intentional homicide
and rape is not as striking: it is from eight-to-twenty years for homicide, and
from eight-to-fourteen years for rape. This makes the punishment for the crime
of rape weightier in Mexico City than it is in the state where the attempted rape
took place, both in relative and absolute terms, and since it is unlikely that in
eight months of living in that state Alvarez would have learned the details of
its criminal justice system, he probably was still thinking along the line of the
Mexican legal framework, if in fact he had any knowledge of it at all. Therefore,
from a sentencing perspective, the idea of going to prison for rape would have
been daunting to him.
Finally, a contributing factor in his unwillingness to confess to attempted rape
might be the element of machismo, that is, assertive or aggressive manliness,
or the “cult of virility” as one psychologist has defined it (Goldwert 1985).
Oral communication to me from college-educated Mexicans, the writings of
Mexican feminist writers (Poniatowska 2000; Torres 1997), and the analysis
of a U.S. anthropologist studying “the meanings of macho” in a working class
colonia (‘housing development’) in Mexico City (Gutmann 1996), all consider
machismo to be a contributing factor to the relatively low rape rates in Mexico.
The Mexican observers explain that rape denotes a lack of virility, because a
“real man” would not need to go so low as to force a woman to have sexual
intercourse with him; he should be able to seduce her without forcing her. And
so to rape a woman is a vilifying crime in Mexico and embarrassing to the man
who resorts to it.
One might conclude that Carlos Alvarez’s resistance to the accusation of
attempted rape may have had to do with all of the factors mentioned above. Ex-
planations of human behavior are usually multi-faceted, and it would be difficult
to conceive of the denial of an action as serious as rape to have been caused
by a single motive. It is not surprising, therefore, that the police in this case
questioned the suspect about the burn marks on his body and about whether he
had a history of psychiatric problems or not.
Alvarez’s strategy of not giving any more information than absolutely nec-
essary, yet still managing to give the appearance of conversational cooperation
with his interlocutors, proved to be a successful one. He never relented on the ac-
cusation of attempted rape. He was, nonetheless convicted of it, and even though
his murder conviction was reversed, the sexual assault conviction was not.
What this analysis has tried to show is that power in social interaction does
not lie with any one participant, not even in sociolegal contexts such as police
interrogations. Thus, while one might easily assume that all the power in such
speech events would be in the hands of the interrogator, the findings presented
here demonstrate that this is far from true. A suspect undergoing police interro-
gation has the power to withhold narrative style discourse and the power to fill
a conversational turn with what are merely repetitions of substance provided in
previous turns. Thus, like soldiers who are trained to provide only their name,
rank and serial number to their captors, suspects who wish to resist implications
of criminal wrongdoing have some powerful verbal resources at their disposal.
Chapter 5
Does every yeah mean ‘yes’ in a police interrogation?
The interrogation of Miguel Peralta, a twenty-year-old U.S. Latino male, by a

bilingual Latino police detective succeeded in producing a confession of murder
from him and resulted in his eventual conviction for that crime. He was accused
of stabbing to death Louise Patterson, an elderly woman, and owner of a conve-
nience store located in a rural area largely populated by migrant farm workers.
According to the public defenders assigned to the case, no physical evidence
was found tying Miguel Peralta to the murder. The only evidence the prosecu-
tion had to successfully convict him was his confession. This chapter shows,
however, that by using an interactional sociolinguistic analytic approach to the
police interrogations of Peralta – focusing on the questions of the interrogating
officer and the responses of the suspect, it can be argued that the “confession”
was in fact either a false confession or an unreliable one.
The police, and evidently the jury, considered the suspect’s answers to their
questions to constitute a confession, because they overwhelmingly took the form
of ‘yeah’ and were interpreted as providing incriminating evidence of his in-
volvement in the murder. Overwhelmingly, the detective’s questions can be seen
to be controlling (i.e., largely belonging to the category of ‘leading questions’).
The fact that the suspect’s answers emerged as a string of virtually unvarying
‘yeah’ tokens – used 278 times – is particularly striking. The virtual absence
of register-shifting in these response tokens defines the mechanical manner in
which he answered the questions. The analysis will demonstrate that the string
of ‘yeahs’ he produced represents an extreme case of ‘gratuitous concurrence’
(Eades 2008; Liberman 1981; Mildren 1999; Walsh 1999) or ‘acquiescence re-
sponse set,’ and that some of these tokens are not affirmations at all, but back
channel signals indicating that the suspect was paying attention to the speech
of his interrogator. While such gratuitous concurrence has been documented

as common among Australian Aboriginal speakers, their prominence in the an-
swering style of a U.S. Latino farmworker points to what this chapter suggests
is a more general phenomenon: acquiescence in the interrogation process to
authority figures by the socially powerless, resulting in unreliable or even false
confessions.
This chapter first examines the questioning strategies of the police detective
who played the principal role in each of four interrogation events, showing how
his interactional behavior invited acquiescent responses from the suspect. The
chapter then presents an analysis of the suspect’s answers to those questions.
102 Does every yeah mean ‘yes’ in a police interrogation?
1. Acquiescence: a cultural, linguistic, and psychological

perspective
Suspects in a murder case can be interrogated by police detectives repeatedly.

When such suspects confess, and the evidence supporting the confession is weak
or non-existent, as it was in the Miguel Peralta case, the question that should be
asked is whether this was a false or, at a minimum, unreliable confession, and if
so, was it extracted through improper police interrogation tactics? The suspect
in this case was considered to have confessed to murder because he answered
‘yeah’ repeatedly to a series of questions, providing what was interpreted as
incriminating evidence of his involvement in the murder.
Miguel Peralta explained that he and a friend had been hired by a local thug
to steal the accounting books of a convenience storeowner, Louise Patterson,
because they contained, among other entries, a record of the debts of the thug
and his associates. According to the defendant’s account, there was no intention
of killing the elderly woman. However, when she caught them in the act and
began screaming, to silence her, one of them beat her to the ground and the other
stabbed her to death. The suspect described his role in the break-in, including
details of how he stuck the knife into her and how he had tried to pull it out.
The evidentiary record does not support this account. According to the de-
fendant’s defense attorneys, no physical evidence was found linking him to the
murder. And when the capital punishment case came up for trial, it ended in
a hung jury, although subsequently, in a second trial the defendant was con-
victed. His confederate, who had helped implicate Peralta by entrapping him in
a covertly tape-recorded telephone conversation monitored by the police, pled
guilty to armed robbery. He was also imprisoned for his role in the burglary gone
awry. Miguel Peralta’s defense attorneys asserted that it was not their client who
had killed the storeowner, but rather the confederate.
The question for those who analyze language in legal settings is how the
police succeeded in obtaining a confession from the suspect, and from a lin-
guistic standpoint, what actually constituted the confession. It will be argued in
this chapter that by responding in the affirmative to most of the questions posed
to him, the suspect constructed a confession, when in fact what he was doing
was repeatedly engaging in gratuitous concurrence. In his case, answering in
the affirmative took the unvarying form of the lexical item ‘yeah.’
What would not have been apparent to a jury panel reading the police tran-
script or listening to the tape-recorded interrogation, is that the confessional
interrogation session immediately followed a prior interrogation, one that had
not been recorded. And so, when the detective is heard asking questions on the
tape, they are questions to which he believes he knows the answers based on
Acquiescence: a cultural, linguistic, and psychological perspective 103
a version of the events that had just emerged in a prior interrogation. We have
no access to that first interrogation, and neither did the jury, since it was nei-
ther audio nor video recorded. Thus, the official record of the interrogation in
reality represents the ‘second time around’ for questioner and respondent. It is
a ‘second telling’ on the part of the detainee, and we have no way of knowing to
what degree open-ended questioning was involved and whether narration was
encouraged or even permitted during the first interrogation.
Most importantly for analysts of speech in interaction and for critical soci-
olinguists are the facts that (1) the primary strategy of the detective was to use
controlling question forms and (2) the repetitive, unvarying lexical item ‘yeah’
used in response to nearly all of the questions represents an extreme (but, I
believe common) case of ‘gratuitous concurrence.’ Gratuitous concurrence is a
notion first documented by Liberman (1981, 1985) among Aboriginal English
speakers of Australia, and confirmed by Eades (1994, 2008), Mildren (1999)
and Walsh (1994, 1999), all of them observers of Australian Aboriginal per-
sons. Liberman sees gratuitous concurrence as a form of accommodation, a
protective device used by Aboriginals in dealing with Anglo Australians, taking
the form of agreeing with whatever the Anglo Australians want, even if they
do not understand what is being asked of them (Liberman1981: 248–249). He
considers gratuitous concurrence to be a feature particular to Aboriginal Aus-
tralian cultural ways of speaking, an outgrowth of their desire to “keep our talk
harmonious” (Liberman 1985: 234). For this reason, they use a “strategy of
acquiescing to the suggestions of their court interrogators” (Liberman 1985:
234). Eades (1994) warns that this strategy puts Aboriginal Australians at risk
in legal settings, since it leads them to give up their right to maintain silence in
the absence of defense attorneys.
Eades (2008) believes that the strategy of gratuitous concurrence used by
Australian Aboriginal people may appear to be similar to ones used by other
sociocultural groups, and that such other groups may be acquiescing out of fear,
or in the case of second language speakers, because of a lack of understanding.

She considers the gratuitous concurrence that is found among Australian Abo-
riginal people to represent the Aboriginal tendency to keep surface harmony, and
work behind the scenes to deal with disagreements, rather than being merely a
response to colonization and subjugation, a position consistent with Liberman’s.
The phenomenon is not limited to Australian Aboriginal people, however.
Among many Meso-American social groups – especially peasants, blue collar
workers, and indigenous peoples – the desire for surface harmony and the avoid-
ance of open interpersonal conflict is a commonly found strategy, particularly in
the context of interaction in asymmetrical social and power relationships (e.g.,
worker/employer, tenant/landlord). My own personal experience of living in a
rural Costa Rican village impressed this cultural trait on me. I have observed it
while living in Mexico and El Salvador as well.
Evidence from comparative studies of interview behavior among U.S. His-
panics, Mexicans, and Americans of European ancestry reveals that while an-
swering batteries of questionnaire items, U.S. Hispanics and Mexicans alike
display a behavior that is similar to that displayed by Australian Aboriginal
people as reported by Eades: they acquiesce to the interviewer, exhibiting a
phenomenon known as ‘acquiescence response set.’ Specifically, they agree
with statements presented to them or answer ‘yes’ to questions, regardless of
content. To test this, survey researchers typically ask respondents nearly iden-
tical questions, reversing the semantic polarity of the questions from one ver-
sion to another. People who exhibit acquiescent response set will answer “yes”
to both the negatively and positively worded questions. In one study (Ross
and Mirowsky’s 1984), for example, comparing the responses of non-Hispanic
whites and Mexican-Americans in El Paso, Texas, with those of Mexicans in
Juárez, Mexico, the Mexican respondents from Juárez showed greater levels of
acquiescent responses than did the Mexican-Americans from El Paso and the
non-Hispanic whites.28 In a study carried out in Latin America, Landsberger
and Saavedra (1967) found that acquiescence is frequent among Spanish speak-
ers, but that it is closely related to educational level (there is greater likelihood
of acquiescence among less well educated respondents than among the bet-
ter educated). Marı́n and Marı́n come to similar conclusions in their study of
U.S. Hispanics versus non-Hispanic whites: education and acculturation levels
correlate with acquiescence among Hispanics.
The existence of acquiescence among U.S. Hispanics has been seen as func-
tional for them, as a “self-presentation strategy of individuals who are relatively
powerless in society . . . Acquiescence becomes a deferential, submissive and
nonresistant response. By giving deferential responses, powerless people present
a ‘good face’ to the other members of society and may become more accepted”
(Marı́n and Van Oss Marı́n 1991: 104, citing Ross and Mirowsky 1984). And
even though education plays a role in determining the level of acquiescence
among U.S. Hispanics, “ethnicity in and of itself seems to be playing a role” as
well – the acculturation level of the Hispanic respondents in one study being a
predictor of acquiescence (Marı́n and Van Oss Marı́n 1991: 104).
The existence of acquiescent response as a cultural feature of Spanish Amer-
ican ways of speaking has been noted by authors writing for non-academic
audiences. A cultural guidebook such as Noble and Lacasa (1995: 34), which
makes broad generalizations about Spanish American culture, points out that
in some parts of Spanish America, “. . . people who are frank, open, and direct
are considered to be rude and blunt. In some places, people who feel that the
one speaking to them is of a higher social status will answer ‘yes’ to a question
just to please the speaker.” The empirical studies of acquiescent response set
among Latinos together with generalizations such as those of Noble and Lacasa
are bolstered by and consistent with the finding of gratuitous concurrence in
judicial speech events among aboriginal people of Australia.
Additional support for the thesis that gratuitous concurrence is likely to
emerge in the interrogation of a great many people of different Latin Ameri-
can origins comes from cross-cultural research on politeness. In one study of
Mexican-American request strategies (Arellano 2000) it was found that farm
workers used indirect and mitigated forms of requests during interactions in
which the hearer had power over them. In other words, authority and level of
imposition had a significant impact on the choice of request strategy employed
by these U.S. Latinos. In a study comparing advice-giving and suggesting among
lower-class Chicanos and middle-class Anglos (‘Anglo’ being the term used in
the U.S. Southwest for persons of European descent), based on Brown and Levin-
son’s (1987) notion of politeness and using naturalistic data, Youmans (2001)
finds that Chicanos tend to use positive politeness strategies, whereas Anglos
prefer to use negative politeness strategies. Koike’s (1998) study of supervi-
sor/assistant teacher interaction in which both conversational partners were of
Mexican origin, finds that both interactants very often oriented themselves to-
ward their own and their interlocutor’s positive face needs, and consequently
employed a wide range of mitigating strategies, such as hesitation markers, at-
tenuations, minimizing expressions, and rising intonation. Further evidence of
a marked preference for mitigation in Mexican discourse comes from Felix-
Brasdefer (2004). His study of speech acts of rejection among male college
students living in Tlaxcala, Mexico demonstrates that there is a clear preference
for mitigation when carrying out rejections when the relationship between in-
terlocutors is characterized by [+power] and [+distance]. An additional study
focusing on social interaction in Mexico is Schrader-Kniffki 2004. This inves-
tigation examines a conflictual interaction between Zapotecs (an indigenous

Mexican group) and a Mexican non-indigenous Spanish speaker, and demon-
strates that Zapotecs’ “way of interacting with members of the out-group has
the function of avoiding conflict and showing respect and, is therefore used as a
politeness strategy” (Schrader-Kniffki 2004: 163), to the point where Zapotecs
accept requests and promise to carry them out even when they know that they
cannot fulfill the promises. Schrader-Kniffki (2004: 162) refers to the “com-
pliance” of Zapotecs in their interaction with out-group members, in that they
prefer to avoid rejecting requests by Hispanophones (i.e., will acquiesce to them)
so as to avoid conflicts.
Several other studies come to similar conclusions regarding the desire on the
part of different Latin American groups to maintain harmony in social relations,
and the consequent reliance on linguistic strategies to achieve such harmony.
Ruzickova’s (2007) study of customer requests in Cuban service encounters,
for example, which tests Brown and Levinson’s theory in a Hispanic cultural
context, finds that Cubans display a greater concern for positive politeness than
they do for negative face wants and that their interactional goal is to achieve
successful and harmonious transactions. Ruzickova points out that the service
encounter in Cuba is not a particularly face-threatening or risky context, and
that Hernández-Flores’ (2004) analysis of Spanish conversations may be correct
in suggesting that “mitigation and repair are primary functions of politeness in
situations that are inherently unfavorable to face,” in contrast to the Cuban
service encounter, in which “politeness may serve to enhance face rather than
to repair face damage” (Ruzickova 2007: 237). It could be argued that a police
interrogation represents a simultaneously positive and negative face-threatening
situation par excellence for a person suspected of a serious crime.
Comparative research emanating from Latin America and Spain finds that
speakers of Peninsular Spanish are more direct than Latin American speakers of
Spanish. Furthermore, when compared to Spaniards who are speaking indirectly,
Latin Americans sound more tentative (Márquez Reiter 2002). Findings from
Ecuador (Placencia 1994), Peru (Garcı́a 1993), and Chile (Puga Larrain 1997)
indicate that Spanish speakers in these countries are characterized as indirect,
formal and deferential in certain contexts. Linguistic tentativeness, indirectness,
and deference, are three qualities that might well be related to acquiescence.
Culture as a factor to be taken into account when interacting with intervie-
wees in legal contexts has been highlighted in the training of those who routinely
work with defendants and witnesses who do not speak or understand the lan-
guage of the law: court interpreters. The annual conferences of U.S. organiza-
tions such as the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators
(NAJIT) regularly feature workshops on cross-cultural communication differ-

ences that can affect the way in which jurors are impacted by the verbal and
nonverbal behavior of Limited English Proficient speakers giving testimony.
The impact of cross-cultural differences in eye contact and gaze patterns among
the non-U.S. born is often pointed out by court interpreters to attorneys and
is included in textbooks aimed at training court interpreters (De Jongh 1992;
Frankenthaler 1982; Gonzalez et al. 1991).29
Despite all of this research, the influence of culture on interviewees’ answers
to police interrogators’ questions has not been given much scholarly attention in
the U.S.A. The work of Cole and Maslow-Armand (1997) and Ainsworth (1993)
stand out as exceptions in this regard. Cole and Maslow-Armand’s (1997: 193,
196) study of “The Role of Counsel and the Courts in Addressing Foreign
Language and Cultural Barriers at Different Stages of a Criminal Proceeding”
finds that,
Cultural and language barriers may affect whether a defendant is able to make a
voluntary confession, knowingly and voluntarily consent to a search, waive the
right to a trial by jury, or fully understand the elements of the charge, the rights
waived, and the effect of the plea in a plea bargain proceeding.
With regard to the Miranda rights alone, Ainsworth (1993) notes that ethnic mi-
norities in the U.S.A. have more difficulty asserting their rights than do Amer-
icans of European descent. A legal scholar trained in linguistics, she refers
to a number of ethnic groups that “use indirect and hedged speech patterns
more frequently than do speakers of standard English,” even when they are
speaking English, and who consequently have especially great difficulty in in-
voking their right to have an attorney present at their interrogation by police
officers (Ainsworth 1993: 318–319). The list of ethnic groups she mentions in-
cludes speakers of African American English Vernacular, Arabic, Farsi,Yiddish,
Japanese, Indonesian, and Greek. González (2003), a specialist in court inter-
preting training and second language acquisition issues, helps fill the lacuna on
the impact of culture on Hispanic answers to police questions. Testifying before
the International Court of Justice, she has pointed out (González 2003: 6–7):
. . . a tendency on the part of Mexican nationals to acquiesce to all demands by
authority figures and answer all questions put to them even if they do not under-
stand them. In an effort to be cooperative and even affable, Mexican nationals
often have a tendency to “pretend” that they understand, that they can speak and
understand English. Perhaps this is done out of pride, but most often it is because
of the cultural conditioning which requires them to speak to authority even if they
cannot speak the language.
González has discovered, furthermore, that, “. . . Mexican nationals believe that

they will be let go if they talk to interrogators, and feel that they must acquiesce
to those in positions of authority” (González 2003: 8).
Forensic linguists Solan and Tiersma (2005) agree that cultural factors can
influence the discourse behavior of immigrants during police interrogations. Cit-
ing the appellate cases of Cuban, Mexican, and Chinese defendants in American
courts, Solan and Tiersma (2005: 84) explain that these defendants waived their
Miranda rights “. . . only because in their original cultures it was unthinkable
to refuse to cooperate with the police.” These scholars point out that in some
countries, “. . . confessions are highly valued and lead to lighter punishment,”
and so “refusing to cooperate with authorities may have dire consequences”
(Solan and Tiersma 2005: 84).
In sum, U.S. Hispanics display acquiescent behavior not only in social science
research surveys, where the perceived social distance and social power differen-
tial between interviewer and interviewee can be moderately but not exceedingly
great, but also in the speech situation (Hymes 1972) of the police interrogation,
which will create a far greater social and power differential between interlocu-
tors, whatever their ethnicity (Heydon 2005; Shuy 1998; Solan and Tiersma
2005; Wrightsman and Kassin 1993). In the case at hand, in which a U.S. His-
panic is interrogated under suspicion of first-degree murder, it would not be
surprising if the detainee responded to questions in an acquiescent fashion. Eth-
nicity is an important factor that helps account for why a suspect in a homicide
case would have answered nearly all of a detective’s questions in a superficially
affirmative way. When other factors are added to it, such as the suspect’s youth,
limited educational attainment, and most importantly, the intimidating nature
of the speech situation and the asymmetrical power relationship between the
suspect and the detective, then the probability of gratuitous concurrence is very
high.
From a conversation analytical perspective, the nature of the police detec-
tive’s first-part in relation to the detainee’s second-part of the adjacency pair
question/answer (Sacks 1992; Schegloff and Sacks 1973) will have its own ex-
planatory weight in accounting for the nature of the answer.30 Specifically, as
will be shown, controlling, or coercive questions result in particular sorts of
answers. Very often they call for agreement with the questioner.
1.1. The psychological perspective on acquiescence, compliance, and

suggestibility and their role in false confessions
According to research, acquiescence, compliance and suggestibility are three

factors that have been identified as leading to false confessions. With respect to
acquiescence, forensic psychologists such as Gudjonsson (1989a, 1989b, 1990,

1991, 1992, 2003), Kassin and McNall (1991), and Wrightsman and Kassin
(1993) and more general social psychologists consider it to be a response style:
acquiescence is “the tendency to agree rather than to disagree with propositions
in general” (Lentz 1938). It has also been considered to be a personality trait
related to submissiveness and eagerness to please (Finlay and Lyons 2001). As
Paulhus puts it, “Some individuals, called yeasayers, tend to agree with state-
ments or say “yes” to questions; other individuals, called naysayers, tend to
disagree with statements or say “no” to questions,” and the tendency is believed
to emerge when the person being interviewed is uncertain, or is characterized
as having a high-anxiety personality (Paulhus 1991: 47). Nevertheless, some
researchers have found that acquiescence interacts with social status variables
such as race and education (Bachman and O’Malley 1984; DeLamater and McK-
inney 1982), and that “complex statements required in much survey research are
highly susceptible to acquiescence in agree-disagree, interrogative, or true-false
format” (Paulhus 1991: 47, emphasis added).
Two other factors identified by forensic psychologists as playing a role in
false confessions are interrogative suggestibility and compliance. The notion of
interrogative suggestibility, first developed by Gudjonsson and Clark (1986) is
defined by Gudjonsson (1991: 280) as, “the extent to which within a closed so-
cial interaction, people come to accept messages communicated during formal
questioning, as the result of which their subsequent behavioral response is af-
fected.” Interrogative suggestibility, according to Gudjonsson (1986, 1989b) as
opposed to ordinary suggestibility, involves the elements of uncertainty and the
presence of a stressful situation. In addition, the interrogator is able to manipu-
late the element of uncertainty, so as to affect the interviewee’s susceptibility to
suggestions. Finally, characteristics of the interviewee can affect his/her her sug-
gestibility, for example, the types of coping strategies that the interviewee uses
during stressful questioning. Gudjonsson’s (2003) research finds a significant
relationship between acquiescence and suggestibility.
A third related psychological concept that is relevant to false confessions
is compliance. Compliance, according to Gudjonsson (1990), is considered to
be distinct from suggestibility, in that suggestibility “does not require an inter-
nal acceptance of the request” and is mediated by variables such as eagerness
to please and avoidance of controversy (Wrightsman and Kassin 1993: 97).
Gudjonsson’s empirical studies find that there is a certain overlap between the
constructs of suggestibility and compliance, in that both are mediated by vari-
ables such as the ones just mentioned; nevertheless, he argues, they are distinct
concepts.
To sum up, my thesis is that whereas the psychological characteristics of per-
sons being interrogated do indeed play an important role in accounting for their
acquiescent and compliant behavior in a police interrogation, cultural factors
are crucially important as well, as too are other extralinguistic and linguistic
elements present in the speech situation and the speech event, most notably
the verbal and non-verbal behavior of interrogators. In short, the interplay of
individual psychological attributes and sociocultural background in what is an
inherently intimidating setting can create a situation that is ripe for a false con-
fession. While the speech setting in and of itself can intimidate the socially
vulnerable (e.g., the young, ethnic minorities, persons without legal residential
status, the cognitively handicapped), intimidation can be accomplished to a great
extent through social interaction as well.
What follows is an analysis of the interaction between a detective and a

suspect over the course of four separate interrogations. It will be shown that
the interrogation strategies employed by the detective when coupled with the
acquiescent verbal behavior of the suspect – largely through the mechanism of
gratuitous concurrence – resulted in a coerced confession to murder.
2. The nature of the interrogations

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, one of the most problematic aspects
of the evidence available on the nature of the police interrogations in which
Miguel Peralta was treated as a suspect is that several of them were not recorded
(either in audio or video format), and that those interrogations that were in
fact recorded represent a ‘second telling’ (Trinch and Berk-Seligson 2002) by
the suspect. The second telling included facts that the police had a particular
interest in hearing about. There is no way of knowing what sorts of questions
were asked and how those questions were answered in the interrogations that
immediately preceded the audio-recorded ones. According to Shuy (1998), a
hallmark of effective interrogations and valid confessions is the full recording
of all interrogation sessions. From the perspective of the police, “by not tape-
recording the ‘actual’ confession, the police invite disagreement and challenge”
(Shuy 1998: 188), and so recording interrogations from beginning to end can
be advantageous to the interrogators. It can be even more vital to those being
questioned, in that fully recorded interrogations almost certainly help to reduce
the frequency of coercive tactics by the police (Donovan and Rhodes 2000;
Drizin and Colgan 2001; Johnson 1997; Kamisar 1977; Kane 1993; Ofshe and
Leo 1997; Sullivan 2004; Weisberg 1961; Westling 2001; White 1997).31 In the
case of Miguel Peralta, the absence of audio recordings of the interviews that
immediately preceded the tape-recorded interrogations on the basis of which
Peralta’s official ‘statements’ (i.e., signed affidavits) were taken, constitutes a

glaring gap in the analyst’s – and juror’s – possible knowledge of how Peralta
was questioned and how he responded. The absence of such recordings casts
a shadow of doubt on the validity of whatever Peralta said the ‘second-time-
around,’ at what the justice system considers to be his official interrogations.
Peralta’s statement made to the police on May 18, 2002 (11:55 a.m.), consid-
ered by the prosecution to be inculpatory, was obtained in a manner that can be
considered to have produced unreliable statements because of the nature of the
questioning approach used by the lead detective. That approach was character-
ized by the following features: (1) the preponderance of controlling or coercive
questions and the infrequent use of open-ended questions and questions that lend

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Chapter 1

Introduction: language and institutional power

book examines coercion from an interactional sociolinguistic point of view,

oneself in a position of dominance, power and control over them.

1. Coerced confessions and wrongful convictions

stage of appeal, an additional 10 percent were reversed after being reviewed at

2. Explanations for wrongful convictions

Why are persons wrongfully convicted? C. Ronald Huff, a professor of Crim-

engage in misconduct, including withholding evidence; false/coerced confessions

One high-proﬁle case of the reversal of wrongful convictions related to false

siders interrogation to be inherently “antagonistic, accusatory and focused on

3. Police-induced false confessions

The behavior of police detectives at custodial interrogations has been shown to

it” (Graef 1990, as cited in Gudjonsson 1993: 220). According to Gudjonsson,

4. Incipient bilingualism and coerced confessions: when the

5. Government response to the need for interpreting/

how to implement Executive Order 13166 in three areas: oral interpretations,

the judicial process.

6. Organization of the book

or videotaped, which serves the dual purpose of providing police transcribers

1. The interpreting continuum

standpoint there appears to be a constant element of unpredictability as to what

munity interpreting’. As Benmaman (1997), Pöchhacker (1997) and Roberts

counsel and prosecution alike.

2. The problem of conﬂict of interest

3. Interpreters for the police: a review of appellate cases

Using a Lexis-Nexis computerized search procedure, I examined appellate cases

police station. They also are used as interpreters of audio- or video-recorded

3.1. Police ofﬁcers as interpreters and translators

People v. González. In a high-proﬁle case in which eighty-seven people died

On the night of his arrest, Torres spontaneously – in highly limited English –

an interpreter to do so” (People v. Torres 1989: 6) The appellate court argued

3.2. The use of non-police personnel as ad hoc interpreters

spot interpreters may even be asked to accompany a witness or suspect to the

3.2.1. Quality checking on ad hoc interpreters

v. Márquez (1992), People v. Ali (1993), and Peña v. State (1983).

become subject to the scrutiny of court-appointed interpreters, who – from the

certainly more coercive from the perspective of asymmetrical power relation-

1. The Miranda Rights

that the interrogating police ofﬁcers disregarded their efforts to do so.

Suspects therefore willingly enter into an interlocutionary relationship with the

2. Subversion of the Miranda rights of a limited-English

3. The case: The People v. Alvarez

According to Judge Russell, two police ofﬁcers began interrogating Alvarez:

terpreting the answer in English, pretended not to understand, saying “¿Cómo?”

3.1. The linguistic achievement of coercion

Asked by Ofﬁcer Calhoun to “[e]xplain to me how you feel,” defendant answered:

3.1.1. Coercion by the police interpreter

should have been merely an interview, it was in reality an interrogation.

3.1.2. Footing as co-interrogator

At a key point in the interrogation, Calhoun is cajoling the suspect to narrate

In another pivotal moment of the interrogation, Calhoun wantsAlvarez to believe

considers himself to be a police detective/interrogator, rather than an ad hoc

this”, Calhoun suddenly becomes aggressive in his interrogation approach – a

3.1.2.1. Moving into interrogator footing

would be unimaginable in a comparable situation where an interpreter is work-

these answers, and an attitude of incredulity. Extracts 7 and 8 below demonstrate

Another instance of the police interpreter acting as interrogator comes after

psychologically vulnerable to confessing.

10 ‘You didn’t know that she was dead?’

Larson’s repetition (in line 13 of Extract 8) of the suspect’s statement about

[A] state law enforcement ofﬁcer conducting an interrogation of one accused of

Manuals on criminal interrogation such as Aubry et al. (1980: 198), however,