Detention and investigation of vulnerable suspects

The detention and investigation of individuals by police is the first stage of a journey through the criminal justice system for most suspects, and it is hard to overstate its importance. The procedures involved in detention, and the experience of the individual detained, set the stage of the police investigation. The police investigation provides the evidence for the subsequent trial and both of these activities underpin conviction and sentence if the individual is found guilty. There is, then, a lot resting on the procedures involved in this detention and investigation stage. The purpose of this chapter is to consider this with particular reference to the experience of suspects who are psychologically vulnerable. Psychological vulnerability (PV) is a term used to describe those who face additional cognitive challenges to most of the rest of the population. Typically, it has described the particular difficulties facing individuals with a mental illness or intellectual disability (Gudjonsson, 2010). Through this chapter, we will demonstrate that individuals with a PV are at an additional disadvantage during social interactions in general, and doubly so when those interactions involve police (department of Health, 2009). This means that police handling of the detention and investigation of individuals with a PV is of paramount importance in ensuring that miscarriages of justice do not occur.