`Interrogating justice: A critical analysis of the police interrogation and its role in the criminal justice process.'.

In recent years the Canadian criminal justice system has been plagued by a number of high profile wrongful convictions. While each of these cases has raised serious questions concerning the justice process as a whole, particular attention has been directed towards the police and their ability to satisfy their dual mandate of investigating crime while protecting the interests, rights, and freedoms of the accused. One notable aspect of police operations that has come under increasing scrutiny in this regard is the police interrogation, a practice which is both upheld by police officers as a crucial means of gathering information and disposing of cases, and denounced by civil rights advocates as a serious threat to the standards of fairness and due process. In adopting the police interrogation as its object of study, this paper will argue that each of these characterizations are severely limited, and ultimately, misrepresentative of the more subtle functions of interrogative practices. Specifically, drawing upon the research literature in Britain, the United States, and Canada, the police interrogation will be conceptualized as an interactional medium in which commitments are fashioned to particular criminal identities and renditions of events in a manner that seeks to confirm and legitimate official police narratives. The implications of this constitutive, rather than merely coercive, function of the interrogation will be examined with particular attention to the issues of police accountability, and the limits of legislative reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]