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 qing ->
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.