Lawyers in interviews ‘I advise you not to answer that question’: conversation analysis, legal interaction and the analysis of lawyers’ turns in police interrogations of suspects

Field: Social Sciences (Social Sciences)

Conversation analysis (henceforth, CA) emerged in the 1960s in the work of the American sociologist, Harvey Sacks, and his colleagues Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. CA's roots are in ethnomethodology (henceforth, EM: literally, 'the study of people's methods'), a programme developed by another sociologist, Harold Garfinkel (1967). His basic idea was that people in society, or members, continuously engage in making sense of the world and, in so doing, methodically display their understandings of it: making their activities 'visibly-rational-and-reportable-for-all-practical-purposes' (Garfinkel 1967: vii). Language was central to the EM project of explicating members' methods for producing orderly and accountable social activities. Like Garfinkel, Sacks's aim was to develop an alternative to mainstream sociology: an observational science of society and social action that could be grounded in the 'details of actual events' (Sacks 1984: 26). CA employs technical transcripts of recordings of everyday and institutional talk ofvarious kinds, and its empirical projects now comprise over forty years of findings about how conversation works. These projects include the analysis of how people take turns in conversation, how turns at talk are designed, what it means to overlap with another speaker or produce a delayed response, how people make reference to one another, how actions (e.g. complaining, questioning, assessing, inviting) are accomplished, how people develop and move through courses of action, how people solve problems in hearing, speaking and understanding, and a range of other conversational phenomena (see Sacks 1992; Schegloff 2007; for introductions see ten Have 2007; Hutchby and Wooffitt 1998). The various interactional contexts that comprise legal institutions (e.g. courtrooms,police stations, emergency services, prisons, legal documents, lawyers' offices) have provided materials for EM and CA since their beginnings. For example, in hisgroundbreaking book on EM, Garfinkel (1967: 105) examined jurors' decision-making practices in the allocation of blame and in 'recommending remedies' (see also Manzo 1996 on jury interaction; and see Bittner 1967; Cicourel 1968; Sacks 1972; Sudnow 1965; Wieder 1974, for other classic ethnomethodological studies of legal institutions). A key conversation analytic study was Atkinson and Drew's (1979) investigation of the organisation of cross-examination in courtrooms, focusing on the design of lawyers' questions – particularly those that were designed to allocate blame – and witnesses' responses to such questions (see also Beach 1985; Bogen and Lynch 1989; Burns 2001; Galatolo 2007; Komter 1998; Lynch 2007; Maynard 1984; Pollner 1974; Pomerantz 1987, on courtroom interaction of various kinds). Other sites of investigation include the everyday workings of law firms (e.g. Travers 1997); the production of legal texts and records (e.g. Komter 2006; Meehan 1986; Summerfield and McHoul 2005); and encounters between citizens and the police (e.g. Meehan 1989; Sharrock and Watson 1989; Whalen and Zimmerman 1990). Interaction in places such as courtrooms can constitute some of the most highly consequential moments in people's lives. This chapter focuses on another potent site of legal interaction: the police interroga-tion of suspects. More specifically, it focuses on the sorts of things that suspects' lawyers do in police interviews, which is a hitherto unexplored aspect of interrogation settings. In presenting our analysis of lawyers' interventions, we aim also to demonstrate and showcase CA as a method for forensic linguistics.