Search results for "suspects"

Two ways of spilling drink : The construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police interviews with suspects

2022

This article explores the construction of offences as ‘accidental’ in police-suspect interactions. The data comprise audio-recorded investigative interviews, which were analysed using conversation analysis. In these interviews, suspects often do not explicitly state the nature of their defence when answering police officers’ questions; instead, suspects’ defensive practices or techniques are embedded in the narrative accounts they give of what happened, thus exhibiting rather claiming their ‘innocence’. My focus here is on a particular type of defence, namely, one in which suspects portray an event as having been ‘accidental’. I show that this defence of ‘accident’ is associated with sever…