‘You do not have to say anything …’: Instructing the jury on the defendant’s right to silence in the English criminal justice system
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Janet Cotterill
Abstract
The right to silence is both a fundamental and a controversial element of the legal process. Suspects and defendants are reminded repeatedly of this entitlement, from the moment of arrest, where the police caution explains that ‘you do not have to say anything …’, to the right of defendants in criminal trials to decline to testify in their own defence. However, the decision to remain silent is not a risk-free strategy for the suspect/defendant in the English legal system. Unlike in the US, where criminal juries are instructed that they may not draw any inferences from such a decision, recent changes in the UK mean that English juries are now instructed that they may draw ‘appropriate inferences’ from the defendant’s failure to speak. This paper draws on a corpus of oral jury instructions taken from English criminal trials where the defendant chose to invoke the right to silence at interview and/or during the subsequent trial. It analyses the communicative strategies employed by trial judges in explaining this aspect of the law to juries in their final jury instructions, and includes a discussion of some of the implications of this erosion of the right to silence for both suspects and defendants.
© Walter de Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Silence in institutional and intercultural contexts
- ‘You do not have to say anything …’: Instructing the jury on the defendant’s right to silence in the English criminal justice system
- A fair share: Gender and linguistic space in a language classroom
- Silence as a means of preserving the status quo: The case of ante-natal care in Ireland
- Managing talk and non-talk in intercultural interactions: Insights from two Chinese–British business meetings
- Negotiating silence and speech in the classroom
- Untold stories and the construction of identity in narratives of ethnic conflict on the Polish–German border
- Busy saying nothing new: Live silence in TV reporting of 9/11
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: Silence in institutional and intercultural contexts
- ‘You do not have to say anything …’: Instructing the jury on the defendant’s right to silence in the English criminal justice system
- A fair share: Gender and linguistic space in a language classroom
- Silence as a means of preserving the status quo: The case of ante-natal care in Ireland
- Managing talk and non-talk in intercultural interactions: Insights from two Chinese–British business meetings
- Negotiating silence and speech in the classroom
- Untold stories and the construction of identity in narratives of ethnic conflict on the Polish–German border
- Busy saying nothing new: Live silence in TV reporting of 9/11
- Book reviews
