Martha Komter has an extensive background in studying the complexities of different kinds of interaction in the Dutch legal system, going back to the 1990s. In this book, Komter follows the career of the suspect's statement, from its construction in the interrogating room to its invocation in the courtroom, through the police report and the case file. Besides aiming to understand the documentary and interactional bases of the Dutch criminal law process, Komter aspires to grasp the effects of document making and handling in institutional settings.
For those who intend on reading this book but are reluctant due to not knowing much about the Dutch legal system, rest assured that the outline provided is very generous. With Komter's accounts, we learn some pertinent features about the Dutch system, such as its character as an inquisitorial system (rather than adversarial). This means that the investigations and testimonies composing the case file have a central role in the trial, since there is no cross-examination of witnesses and suspects by lawyers and prosecutors.
Following the trajectory of the suspect's statement, Komter mainly draws on the work of Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs, and Jan Blommaert. The authors’ interpretations of entextualisation (making the discourse an extractable text), decontextualisation (extracting the text from its context of use), and recontextualisation (recentering the text in another context of use) ground Komter's examination of the suspect's statement as it is acquired in the interrogation, registered in the police report, and handled in the trial.
In the interrogating room, the police officers taking the statement decide what must be registered and what must be excluded. For instance, some adversarial episodes and strategies are often left out, and so it happens with replies regarded as irrelevant or truthless. Throughout Komter's chapters, we see that the recordability of the suspect's answers and the police interrogation tactics set up the configuration of the report. Further, the police report foregrounds future uses of the suspect's utterances in other instances of the criminal process. Therefore, eventual readers of the report ‘get limited insight into the conditions under which “the suspect's statement” has come about, or into the effects these conditions may have on the text’ (178).
Additionally, Komter's research reveals the manipulation of the case file, including the police report, which enables courtroom professionals (judges, lawyers, prosecutors, etc.) to perform their various tasks. And so, the suspect's statement, an emergent and sequentially transformed product, becomes a piece in the courtroom play.
In this rigorous book, Komter offers a detailed investigation of entextualisation. Any researcher working on how discourse changes as it is decentered and recentered across contexts will profit from including The suspect's statement in her or his theoretical framework, for it gives insight on the shaping of institutions that seem to have always ‘been there’.
