The purpose of this paper is to illuminate to the academic and research audience the legal implications for suspects who are interviewed under caution for historical allegations, when the suspect’s responses rely on episodic memory recall.
The paper is a review of a multi-disciplinary literature base, necessary to understand the problem with the qualified right to silence.
The findings suggest that more research work is needed in order to be able to assess the difficulties for a suspect faced with answering questions of an episodic nature and the subsequent implications for the defendant once on trial. Implications: the current situation can lead to miscarriages of justice, which are difficult to rectify.
This paper brings together a number of sub sections of disciplines from criminal law, criminology, forensic psychology, and mainstream psychology (i.e. memory work) to identify a potentially serious problem for preventing miscarriages of justice with the current system of qualified rights to silence whilst being interviewed under caution in the case of historical allegations.
