Jackie Hodgson
Neil Stewart
 Working
in an interdisciplinary way is
hard!
 Exploring criminal justice issues from
both disciplinary perspective
 Identifying common interests; points of
tension; different or conflicting
understandings
 Planning a joint research project in which
both disciplinary perspectives can
contribute to the research (questions)
 Adversarial
and inquisitorial procedural
models
 Different forms of evidence (written/oral
testimony)
 Parties/centralised process of gathering,
assembly, selection and presentation of
evidence
 Resource (rather than procedural) driven
changes to written evidence – managing
and agreeing the evidence
 Do
we attach more or less credibility to
evidence presented orally or in
writing?(Apart from the fact that witness
testimony can be interrogated)
 The importance of the process of producing
evidence (judicial/police/defence q’ing ->
statement)
 Is the process masked by different modes of
presentation – do jurors realise that
statements are police constructions?
 Is it important that a story unfolds over time
(witnesses in a trial) rather than being
presented as a case file?
 How
does the integration of evidence into
an overall decision differ for oral vs. written
evidence?
 The context of oral evidence, where the
witness is led and then cross examined, is
quite different from a witness statement
 What about repeated evidence, initially
written and then oral? Massed vs.
distributed practices
 Lack of emotional context in written
evidence
 Written
evidence is in the first person, even
though it is written by someone else. Do
jurors appreciate the origin of the evidence,
and that the writer may impose their own
perspective?
 Is
written evidence taken as more truthful?
Perhaps, ecologically, written words are
more reliable than spoken words. But
perhaps the context of the court makes
witnesses more reliable for in-count oral
evidence vs. in-the-home written evidence.