Chapter 1 examines the steps that are attendant to custodial interrogation in the United States. Many of these steps, and what they entail, are not readily known to the general public. Hence, to contextualize the corpus, Chapter 1 starts with a brief overview of what constitutes custodial interrogation, leading to a description of the federal court system that reviewed the cases. This examination will provide insights into the inner workings of the federal courts and the role of the judges in the federal court system. Chapter 1 also provides a brief overview of the common grounds for appeals in cases reviewing potential Miranda violations, as well as definitions for the terminology often referred to in the chapters. The chapter concludes with a brief analysis on the three key themes of the book: the legal foundation of police interrogation, the strategic features of invoking counsel in custodial settings, and tackling police interrogation reform in the United States.

Chapter 3 delves into commonly used police interrogation techniques in the United States, such as behavioral analysis approaches to interrogation (the Reid technique) and other rapport-based methods featured in the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) Report (2016). This chapter focuses on some of the interrogation methods used by police, law enforcement agencies of the United States federal government (e.g., FBI, DEA), and the military to interrogate custodial suspects and evaluates how these methods fit with the Miranda rights and a suspect’s ability to invoke counsel in a custodial setting. How interrogators approach the Miranda rights stage of an interrogation across the book’s corpus, and potentially across interviewing styles, provides insights into the possible connection between the law and how interviewing styles are used and implemented in the United States. Chapter 3 also raises additional considerations when discussing any interrogation or interviewing style, in light of current United States law.

Chapter 4 provides the theoretical framework for suspects’ invocations for counsel in the book’s corpus. The analysis will focus on the discursive features of suspects’ invocations for counsel during custodial interrogation, as well as the sequences of talk that follow the suspects’ invocations. This part of the analysis will use applied game theory, specifically hypergame theory, to describe police-suspect exchanges after a suspect invokes counsel. The model of the invocation game of police interrogation extends signal analysis from simple signaling games into extended conversations based on strategic objectives. This application of game theory to the invocation stage of an interrogation shows how an interrogator can manipulate a custodial suspect to change their preference to invoke counsel due to the ambiguities created by case law, which designates interrogators as arbiters of what constitutes an unequivocal invocation of the right to counsel, and stylized by formal training that encourages interrogators to engage in strategic discourse with suspects to maintain the possibility of obtaining statements.

Chapter 5 provides a statistical analysis of the legal rulings that comprise the book’s corpus. The analysis looks at the possible relationships between the variables that make up the corpus, including types of invocations for counsel, types of suspects (e.g., juveniles, L2 speakers), and the judges’ presidential appointments, among an array of other legal and linguistic factors, and the judges’ rulings on the legal standing of the suspects’ invocations for counsel. To frame the discussion and understand the seeming disconnect between suspects’ invocations for counsel and the application of the law, the chapter provides a description of the corpus, the entry and selection of variables, and the research questions posed. The findings of the analysis provide further evidence of the effect of judicial rulings on the suspects/defendants’ legal journey. Given the potential significant role of suspects’ statements in the conviction of a crime, this chapter also includes a discussion on whether a ruling that suppresses such statements is enough to reverse a lower court’s ruling on the use of such statements and/or its content in court.

Chapter 2 explores how law enforcement’s ability to engage discursively with suspects and other lay persons is limited by the law. Judicial rulings regarding suspects’ rights during custodial interrogation, such as the right to counsel, provide insights into how the United States federal court system, led by the main court of the land the Supreme Court of the United States, views suspects’ constitutional rights, on the one hand, and the societal benefit of police officers being able to conduct criminal investigations, on the other. The chapter discusses the evolution of the right to counsel in the federal courts, since the seminal Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruling, and the insights this history provides in framing the law as a facilitator or, alternatively, a deterrent to suspects invoking their right to counsel, prior to the onset of custodial interrogation. This analysis of opinions from the Court, circuit courts, district courts, and a few military courts, that make up the book’s corpus, will shed light on how judges have viewed the role of police in society, through time, and whether some in the judiciary consider the Miranda ruling as overreaching in its ‘intended’ constitutional protections.

Chapter 6 will explore paths to moving forward with police interrogation reform in the United States, parting from the lessons of other countries that have undertaken reform, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Norway, and Canada, while focusing on three key areas: 1) police interrogation techniques, 2) the interview of vulnerable populations, and 3) changes in case law related to the reading of rights, invocation of rights, the use of trickery and deception, as well as the use of confessions to build and prosecute a criminal case. The goal of the chapter is to consider ways in which the issues presented in this book can be revisited to change the current state of police interrogation in the United States. This will require changes across the board: legislative, legal, police interviewing training, and also an acknowledgment of the role of cognitive, cultural, and sociolinguistic factors in police-suspect discursive interactions. A change of perspective on the presence of counsel in the interview room is also explored, looking at other jurisdictions outside of the United States which provide access to counsel to custodial suspects.