Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors

Abstract

2017) Oxford: Oxford University PressDeceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors is part of the Oxford Studies in Language and Law, a series of volumes covering a broad range of topics at the intersection between language use and civil and criminal law. This book presents 15 cases in which ve types of representatives of the legal system (police interviewers, prosecutors, undercover agents, cooperating witnesses and complainants) use ambiguity in a deceptive manner during the course of their interactions with suspects, defendants and targets of undercover operations. Each of the ve analysis chapters deals with three cases. The data include transcripts, audio and video recordings, police statements and comparative documents.The book is divided into nine chapters. The rst two provide introductory comments and discussions of a number of main concepts such as (institutional) power, deception and ambiguity. All representatives of the legal system discussed in this book possess institutional power: for police interviewers and courtroom questioners, this power is transparent, while for undercover agents, cooperating witnesses and complainants the power is camou aged. 'Deception' is commonly de ned as 'the intentional e ort to cause receivers to misperceive something ' (p. 14; cf. Coleman and Kay, 1981, whereas 'ambiguity' is more subtle and nuanced, in that ambiguous expressions carry more than one possible meaning (p. 4). Language per se is famously ambiguous and interlocutors derive the correct meaning from the context that the interaction takes place in. The use of ambiguous statements or questions by representatives of the law can result in suspects, defendants and targets giving responses that can in turn be misinterpreted as