Evasion in police-suspect interrogating discourse : a discourse analytic study of the transcript of the interrogation of Anthony Sowell

Abstract EN

This research paper attempts to study evasion in police- suspect interrogating discourse.

It selects the transcript of the interrogation of Anthony Sowell as its data for analysis.

It shows that evasion exists only in conversational discourse that is mainly based on question- answer sequences.

And in most of the cases, it is intentional.

So, a discourse analytic approach is appropriate.

In the case of this research, the police officers interrogate Anthony Sowell, a real serial killer, to get confessions from him about his crimes.

But Anthony does his best to offer them evasive answers.

His cunningness lies in his ability to afford answers which are semantically irrelevant and pragmatically coherent at the same time.

He pretends to be cooperative whereas in fact he is not.

The framework of this research is two- fold.

It studies evasion and the detection of evasion through questioning.

On one hand, it works on the level of evasion from the part of the suspect.

It shows that the evasive answers of the suspects are covert and overt.

And on the other hand, it inspects the detection of evasion through questioning by the police interrogators.

Regarding covert evasion, the research applies a theoretical framework that studies it from the following three perspectives: 1) changing the textual context of the question; 2) changing the focus of the question; and 3) changing the focus and the textual context of the question (Galasinski, 2000).

And concerning overt evasion, the theoretical framework focuses on 'opting out'.

The research shows that evasion with its two types is deceiving because on the surface, the suspect seems cooperative, but underneath, he is not.

As for the detection of evasion, the theoretical framework of this research spots light on the interviewers' reactions towards this evasion.

It uses 'contingent questions', 'presupposition triggers' and 'next questions' as frameworks for the detection of evasion.

Two types of contingent questions are discussed: 'and- and so- prefacing questions.

The research concludes that the conflict between interrogators and suspects is endless.

Interrogators still need to exert more effort to be able to elicit true information and detect evasion during their cross interrogation of the suspects.