Persuasion in the Legal Process

Definitions:

• Persuasion: an attempt in communication to convince others to do or believe something
• Deception: persuasion by misleading, misinforming or misdirecting 
• Lying: asserting a proposition that we do not believe 

Nature of Lying:

• 3 elements of lying (Coleman and Kay 1981)
  • Factual falsity: 'the earth is flat' 
  • Falsity of belief: 'I know in fact, the earth is flat' 
  • Intention to decieve: 'I want you to believe the earth is flat'
• Liar Paradox 
  • 'I am lying' 
  • Refers to what was just said, not what you are saying now
• Plato's and Neitszche's cynical certainties 
  • Everything we know is a lie
  • How can we distinguish a truth from a lie? 

• Speaker has a commitment to truthfulness

Grices Maxim of Quality:

• Make your contribution one that is true 
• Do not say what you believe to be false - sincerity 
• Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence - accuracy 
• Truthfulness requires both sincerity and accuracy 

Sincerity and Accuracy:

• Sincerity: sharing with your interlocutor what they have a right to know 
• Accuracy: caring about getting things right 

Discourse strategies of insincerity:

• WIthholding: keeping back salient truths 
• Misleading: implicitly suggesting what you do not believe 
• Lying: explicitly asserting what you do not believe 

We can suspend our commitment to truthfulness in some contexts:

• Conventional 
  • Prescribed: fiction, comedy
  • Performed: irony, hyperbole, metaphor 
• Consequential
  • Polite: save face of others eg false invitation
  • Protective: save others or oneself from harm eg murderer at the door 
  • Condonable: playful eg pranks 

Perjury: 

• Legal determination of lying as criminally sanctionable 
• Testimonial oath: 
  • Converts truth presumption into prescription: an oral contract that binds witnesses to truth of their words 
• Bronston Case 
  • Inquisitorial system: truth is elicited
  • Adversarial system: truth is tested 

• Trust based on risk, leap of faith 
• More we trust, less likely to worry about deception 

• Presumption of Trust 
  • Have to trust the world will function normally 
  • Lying breaches trust between interlocutors: misleads the hearer

• Contracts and Trust 
  • Default position: parties cannot be trusted to keep their word 
  • Contracts bind them legally to their word 
  • By blindly trusting a company, we take on all risks 
  • Companies invest no trust in the user 
  • Users are bound by the terms of the company
  • In companies best interest if user doesn't read terms 

Lying in Testimony: trust in the witness is assigned according to - 

- Percieved inherent trustworthiness 

- Percieved credibility of testimony 

• Defendant contrasts to gentleman/expert:
  • Strong vested interest 
  • Statistically more likely to be lower class 
• Archetypal context of distrust 
  • Cannot expect participants to be honest 
  • Lawyer bound by code of ethics that may clash with code to represent clients best interests 
• Defendant testifying
  • Working class defendants suffer link between trust and class 

• From Lie to Liar 
  • Stressing frequency of lying 
  • Collective lies 
  • Repetition 
  • Intensification 
  • Morality 
  • Capacity to lie 
  • Normality of lying 

• Context of extreme institutional distrust 
• Different rules
  • In US jurisdictions; distrust legitimates police lying to the suspect 
  • Suspects not allowed to lie and can be charged for false statement 
  • Suspect may trust interrogator as figure of authority
• Deceptive techniques used in the US 
  • Lying 
  • Intimidation 
  • Silence
  • False sympathy 
  • False empathy 
  • Altering information 
  • Pointing out contradictions 
  • Bodily cues of deception 
  • Minimising the seriousness of the defendants actions 
  • Focussing on the futility of denial

• Win-win testing 
  • If suspect fails, interrogator will lie and say this proves guilt 
  • If suspect passes, interrogator will lie and claim they failed
• Vulnerable suspects will trust the interrogator and the technology 
  • Leads to false confessions 
  • Convinced of crimes they did not commit