Criminal Justice - Investigations Deception Essay

Conversely, guilty callers generally try to conceal their criminal involvement by requesting help for themselves, providing extraneous irrelevant information, and tend to be somewhat uncooperative while maintaining a calm and collected demeanor (Addams & Harpster, 2008).

During other phases of investigation such as interviews, investigators are trained to detect subtle choices of words that often correspond to intentional deception.

Specifically, individuals attempting to lie to investigators do not lie directly as often as indirectly, such as by omitting information instead of making affirmative statements that are untrue (Sandoval, 2008; Schafer, 2008). Examples of passive attempts to misrepresent information during criminal investigators and sworn testimony tend to employ text bridges in the form of words and phrases like "and then" or "later on" where their criminal conduct took place during the period of time corresponding to those text bridges (Schafer, 2008).

Similarly, guilty individuals attempting to conceal or minimize their connection to crimes often employ words that change the temporal context. Specifically, when describing events in the past, people generally use the past tense, as in "We went downstairs to watch television...' However, individuals attempting to conceal information typically change to present tense, such as by saying "...after that, I get up and go outside for a while." According to psychologists, this is a function of the fact that When recalling past events, subjects replay those events in their mind's eye; conversely, when fabricating events to conceal information, subjects tend to switch (unconsciously) to present tense because they are creating those events in real time instead of recalling them in the past (Sandoval, 2008).

Conclusion:

Detection of attempted deception by subjects of criminal investigations is a common aspect of all criminal investigations, interrogations, and examination under oath.

Generally, individuals seeking to conceal the truth employ common tactics in the realm of word usage, sentence structure, and specific content of their statements to investigative authorities. With training into the nature of unconscious mannerisms and conversational strategies typically employed in the deliberate obfuscation of the truth, investigators (and jurists) can distinguish truthful statements from deceptive ones with considerable reliability.

References Adams, S. And Harpster, T. (2008). "Homicide Calls and Statement Analysis" FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin; Vol. 77 No. 6, (pp. 22-31).

Conlon, E. (2004). Blue Blood. New York: Riverhead.

Sandoval, V. (2008). "Interview Clues: Words That Leave an Investigative Trail" FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin; Vol. 77 No. 1, (pp. 1-9).

Schafer, J. (2008). "Text Bridges and the Micro-Action Interview" FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin; Vol. 77 No. 1, (pp. 20-24).

Schmalleger, F. (2008). Criminal Justice…