Intoxicated witnesses and suspects An archival analysis of their involvement in criminal case processing.pdf (502.97 kB)
Intoxicated witnesses and suspects: an archival analysis of their involvement in criminal case processing.
journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-01, 09:39 authored by Francesca T. Palmer, Heather Flowe, Melanie K. Takarangi, Joyce E. HumphriesResearch about intoxicated witnesses and criminal suspects is surprisingly limited, considering the police believe that they are quite ubiquitous. In the present study, we assessed the involvement of intoxicated witnesses and suspects in the investigation of rape, robbery and assault crimes by analyzing cases that were referred by the police to a prosecutor’s office. Results indicated that intoxicated witnesses and suspects played an appreciable role in criminal investigations: Intoxicated witnesses were just as likely as sober ones to provide a description of the culprit and to take an identification test, suggesting criminal investigators treat intoxicated and sober witnesses similarly. Moreover, intoxicated suspects typically admitted to the police that they had consumed alcohol and/or drugs, and they were usually arrested on the same day as the crime. This archival analysis highlights the many ways in which alcohol impacts testimony during criminal investigations, and underscores the need for additional research to investigate best practices for obtaining testimony from intoxicated witnesses and suspects.
History
School
- Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences
Published in
Law and Human BehaviorVolume
37Issue
1Pages
54 - 59Citation
PALMER, F. ...et al., 2013. Intoxicated witnesses and suspects: An archival analysis of their involvement in criminal case processing.. Law and Human Behavior, 37(1), pp. 54-59.Publisher
© American Psychological AssociationVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2013Notes
This article may not exactly replicate the final version published in the APA journal. It is not the copy of record.ISSN
0147-7307eISSN
1573-661XPublisher version
Language
- en