Interrogation Double Blind.

Essay by cbrat15College, Undergraduate April 2003

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To determine the ethics that factor into what is known as Interrogation Double Bind, one must first be able to define it. Interrogation Double Bind is what happens to a witness or a victim, when he or she is put on stand. Once a person is placed in front of the courtroom, that person becomes a guinea pig. In other words, this person has very little control, if any, and this person is subject to preconceived judgments.Whatever the litigant may say to or ask of this person, the person in the hot seat will come off looking hostile, uncooperative, incompetent, or even appear to be lying. This witness never emerges credible to the court.

Lawyers have many techniques in playing with the court's mind: use of pauses, certain intonations, use of negative and degree words, and so on. For example, in the handout under Text 2.1, the lawyer asks the witness, "Then they are not in substantially the same condition, are they?" He pauses for 2.5

seconds, which is hardly enough time to answer then proceeds to shout, "Are they?" This makes the witness seem uncooperative due to her hesitance to answer the question. Another example, as seen in Text 2.5 of the same handout, has the lawyer asking the witness is she was attracted to Brian and she replies, "I thought he was a nice clean-looking man." The lawyer then asks her again, but this time in another degree, "He was attractive-looking right?" When she agrees, he then changes the sentence to now say, "...that he was a good-looking man," which the witness is tricked into agreeing with. Because he changed the severity of the attraction word, the witness eventually looks as if she was attracted to Brian. This did not help her case, considering this was part...