Understanding of rights of detained suspects by the police in England and Wales

Abstract

The England and Wales Police Notice provides information about the right to remain silent to suspects in police custody. Although previous studies of other groups have suggested that the notice is too complex for detainees to fully understand, this issue has not previously been directly examined among police detainees. In this paper, we examined the understanding of the Notice of Defendant's Rights in two groups: suspects at the police station (n=30) and people attending a job centre in the same area (n=24), who were matched for intellectual ability. In both groups, understanding of the notice was very limited and did not relate to their status at the time of testing or their self-reported experience of the criminal justice system. Even in the optimal test conditions, only 11% (six) of participants were able to demonstrate a full understanding of its meaning. The problem is that although over 96% (fifty-two) claimed to have fully understood the warning after being served in the usual police manner, none of them actually did so. Finally, the research suggests practical measures to mitigate these problems, but the importance of designing a new, simplified version of the current warning cannot be overemphasized; otherwise, there is a risk of miscarriages of justice.