“Are You Saying You Were Stabbed . . . ?”: Multimodality, Embodied Action, and Dramatized Formulations in “Fixing” the Facts in Police Interviews with Suspects

Interviewers in criminal investigations engage suspects in forensic questioning in an attempt to transform from unsettled to settled (Kozin 2008) “the facts” (events, behaviour and speech) in relation to alleged crimes. In questions such as “Are you saying xxx?” or “You say xxx” officers challenge suspects’ versions of events, treating them with doubt and disbelief in an attempt to transform their accounts and “fix” the facts (Kozin 2008) for the record. Combining insights from previous research on reported speech (e.g. Clift and Holt 2007), formulations (e.g. Drew 2003), and gesture (e.g. Goodwin 2000, Kendon 2004, Matoesian 2012, McNeill 1992, 2005, Streeck 2009) , I look not just at what is done in these questions - blame allocation, moral evaluation – but how actions of settling on agreed evidential facts are accomplished through the coordination of the reported talk with bodily interaction such as posture, gesture, gaze, and the manipulation of objects. Two video-taped police interviews are examined, to understand how institutional practices of evidence production are multimodally accomplished, through synchronising embodied action and speech. Focusing on a micro-analysis of the linguistic environment of the verb SAY, I show how facts and their denial are multimodally co-constructed. While current monomodal interview records produced for linguistic analyses or summarised for court cases, ignore or overlook the multimodal, the analysis shows that implications for the justice system are that evidence is compromised. Dramatised multimodal formulations produce more powerful evidence for both prosecution and defence than logocentric ones.