More about Performance and Confession

I'm continuing to work on a project about filmed confessions. Yesterday, I had a very helpful conversation with several of my colleagues about my theory that all custodial confessions are kinds of performances that enact an identity that may not have existed prior to the confession. Filmed confessions are a subgenre of these performances that have peculiar interpretive problems associated with their filmic nature.

One of my colleagues pointed me to the History of the Peloponnesian Wars by Thucydides where, among other things, Thucydides attempts to set himself apart from other chroniclers. Considered the first "historian," he claims to be telling a story about the Peloponnesian Wars that are empirically verifiable. With this claim, it is said, he is the first to draw the line between myth or  stories and history. What is interesting about Thucydides for the purpose of my concerns about confessions as a form of performance (narrative storytelling that enact identities, bring them to life) is that Thucydides' history -- despite its reliance on empirical data -- is recounted in dramatic form, much in the style of Homer's Odyssey or Sophocles' Oedipus.  The History of the Peloponnesian War, considered one of the first "modern" histories (not only because of its emphasis on verifiable fact but also because of its emphasis on human causality as opposed to divine intervention), is structured around orations and speeches, all in the Latin hortatory subjunctive case.  In this way, much of the "history" told is recounted in a first person dialogue among statesmen that is clearly performative in nature -- presenting an argument or declaration to a crowd of citizens. (The Latin hortatory case, I am learning, is a form of the subjunctive that delineates or signals a speech, a kind of presentation or claim to an audience. Like generic markers "Once upon a time..." or "It was a dark and stormy night...", the Latin subjunctive signals to the audience that a particular kind of speech is about to take place.)  A wonderfully ironic detail of this history is that Thycidides admits that he is recalling the speeches and many were told to him second hand. The "hearsay" quality of the speeches throws their veracity into doubt and their inclusion, nontheless, suggests Thycidides is very concerned with helping bring the history alive, to an audience -- to reconstitute it for the present.

So I began doing what my friends in comparative literature do, wondering aloud how much Thucydides' form and purpose have in common with filmed confessions.  What are the markers of the filmed confession that are like the Latin hortatory case? (There are many, many commonalities among filmed confessions that signal the fact of film, the larger audience the film engenders, the self-conscious nature of filmed speech.) And how are the purposes of the filmed confession and the uses to which the confessions are put similar to the motivations behind Thucydides' new theory of storytelling, that is "history"?  (Confessions are filmed, for the most part, to "record what actually happened" in the precinct house.)

Comments

[Kirk]

That's an interesting idea. Have these commonalities that you mentioned been empirically validated as being unique to taped confessions? My experience with this is very limited, but I imagine that factors such as the length of the police interrogation and the related stress involved, work to make the suspect less aware of a camera.

[JSilbey]

I've seen about a dozen filmed confessions, and in all of them there is significant "play" to the camera. It is not clear to me (yet) the differences in length of interrogation as between the confessions. (I haven't been able to collect all the facts of the investigations on every one of the confessions yet.) And so I can't yet evaluate if they are all similar in how long the interrogations were going on before the camera was turned on. And, I am not sure how to compare the "performative quality" of these filmed confessions with confessions that are unfilmed, unless we are only comparing the spoken rhetoric (and not the body language, film image, etc.). That would be another project all together. To be sure, there are some good investigations of the rhetorical structure of spoken confessions (Peter Brooks of this blog has a fabulous book, Troubling Confessions on this topic). I am mostly interested in how it appears the film affects our interpretation of the confession (or our interpretation of its value in the legal system). My comparison is between filmed confessions and other types of films, not filmed confessions and unfilmed confessions, although perhaps I should also look into that.

[bjr]

I am interested in your opinion on whether the way film influences the interpretation of confessions varies depending on the audience and purpose for which the film is being exhibited. (Sorry for the sentence construction!) As I understand the taped confession, the main (or at least first) audience is the judge. The video is intended to demonstrate a lack of coercion, not (necessarily) for its persuasive bearing on the guilt/innocence question. In this respect, is there “play” to the camera by the police as well as by the suspect? (Am I incorrect in assuming that the “play referenced in your post was on the part of the suspect?)

When the confession is played for the jury (does this happen often?), it has bearing on the guilt/innocence question, and the prosecution wants it (and the defendant, ironically) to appear as persuasive as possible in the even that the defendant later recants. But highly persuasive confessions (for the substantive question and the jury) may be least likely in cases where it is most necessary to videotape the confession in order to convince the judge that it was not coerced – where the suspect is intelligent, articulate, of age, etc. – and there may be an inverse relationship between the videotape’s value at various stages of the proceeding. Is there evidence that these two audiences interpret the same confession in different ways, given their different experiences, purposes, and institutional roles?

[jsilbey]

These are good questions. As to the first -- do police "play" to the camera -- I would say yes. But perhaps not in the way you are thinking. The film is said to encourage police to "behave" (tone down coercive tactics) because the film will be seen by those who will judge the coerciveness of the interrogation (judges, for the most part). Insofar as this "film effect" works, police "perform" by changing their manner because of the film. I am not sure whether this translates to a less coercive environment, however. There is, of course, much to the environment that is not seen on film but is certainly experienced by both interrogator and defendant.

It is not often (that I have found) that the confession is played for the jury by the defense in order to prove innocence or coercion. The exception is when the film is "incomplete" (has gaps) and the defendant wants to argue that what happened during the gaps in the film is crucial to understanding his state of mind during the interrogation and the truthfulness of his statements. When a filmed confession is introduced at trial, it is often "renarrativized" by the defense attorney to mean exactly the opposite of what it seems to mean. The Bernhard Goetz confession is a classic example of this. There, defense attorney Slotnik successfully convinces the jury that most of Goetz's confession should be believed (he was in reasonable fear of his life) but that the crucial statement about how he returned to shoot the already wounded men again was a fabrication. This is evidence of an answer to your second question: the confession can mean different things (even contradictory things) at different points of the legal adjudication process.

[Coach Outlet]

Chief Justice Robert's decision for the unanimous Court in in the law school/military recruiting