Deceptive Ambiguity by Police and Prosecutors
- ISBN-10
- 0190669918
- ISBN-13
- 9780190669911
- Category
- Law
- Pages
- 240
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2017-09-01
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Roger W. Shuy
Description
Much has been written about how criminal suspects, defendants, and the targets of undercover operations employ ambiguous language as they interact with the legal system. This book examines the other side of the coin, describing fifteen criminal investigations that demonstrate how police, prosecutors, and undercover agents use deceptive ambiguity with their subjects and targets, thereby creating misrepresentations through their uses of speech events, schemas, agendas, speech acts, lexicon, and grammar. This misrepresentation also can strongly affect the perceptions of later listeners, such as judges and juries, about the subjects' motives, predispositions, intentions, and voluntariness. Deception is commonly considered intentional while ambiguity is often excused as unintentional, in line with Grice's maxim of sincerity in his cooperative principle. Most of the interactions of suspects, defendants, and targets with representatives of law enforcement, however, are oppositional, adversarial, and non-cooperative events that provide the opportunity for participants to stretch, ignore, or even violate the cooperative principle. One effective way law enforcement does this is by using ambiguity. Suspects and defendants may hear such ambiguous speech and not recognize the ambiguity and therefore react in ways that they may not have understood or intended. The fifteen case studies in this book illustrate how deceptive ambiguity, whether intentional or not, is used as commonly by police, prosecutors and undercover agents as it is by suspects and defendants.
Get the book
Other editions
Similar books
-
Animal Fakes & Frauds
By S. Peter DanceAnimal Fakes & Frauds
-
The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception
By Roger W. ShuyShuy provides specific advice in this book about how to conduct interrogations that will yield credible evidence.
-
Iron Mask: The Story of Harry Bensley's Walking Round the World Hoax
By Steve HollandThe final challenge was that, despite keeping his face hidden, he had to find a wife.This is the story of that journey and how, rather than being the result of a $100,000 (£21,000) wager, it was a hoax dreamed up by Harry Bensley, released ...
-
The Talking Typewriter
By Tibor Gergely, Margaret PrattCharming vintage story of a boy and his imaginary friend 'Mr. Asterisk; who guides him in learning to use his typewriter to write a novel. Johnny Hunt-and-Pecker Hopkins learns to typewrite in a few easy lessons from the Asterisk Man.
-
The Lying Stones of Dr. Johann Bartholomew Adam Beringer: Being his Lithographiae Wireceburgensis
Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.
-
Vagueness: A Reader
By Peter Smith, Rosanna KenneyThe following group of papers represent current work on the logic and semantics of vagueness. The essays in the final group are contributions to the continuing debate about vague objects and vague identity.
-
Kanzi's Primal Language: The Cultural Initiation of Primates into Language
By P. Segerdahl, W. Fields, S. Savage-RumbaughThis book takes the reader behind the scenes of the filmed language tests.
-
Willful Ignorance: The Mismeasure of Uncertainty
By Dr. Herbert I. WeisbergDefending His Empire In 1743, de Moivre felt called upon to confront a challenge posed (he believed) by an upstart teacher of mathematics (and part-time weaver) by the name of Thomas Simpson (1710–1761). Simpson was self-taught and in ...
-
The Myth of the Chemical Cure: A Critique of Psychiatric Drug Treatment
By J. MoncrieffThis book overturns the idea that psychiatric drugs work by correcting chemical imbalance and analyzes the professional, commercial and political vested interests that have shaped this view.
-
The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence
By National Research Council, Division on Earth and Life Studies, Commission on Life SciencesThis volume offers recommendations for handling DNA samples, performing calculations, and other aspects of using DNA as a forensic toolâ€"modifying some recommendations presented in the 1992 volume.