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Other Applications 377

Witnesses

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

A ‘witness’ is any person who is able to provide information, possibly intelligence or evidence
relating to a matter of concern such as:

• a person who saw a car accident;
• an accountant who can explain how the sales invoicing system operates;
• an interviewer who can say what a suspect admitted to him;
• a doctor who can explain the reasons why someone died.

There are three main problems with witnesses. The first is that a person may not wish to
become involved, for reasons ranging from apathy to fear, and in the corporate fraud area,
because he has been bribed or pressurized. The second problem is that some people genuinely
cannot remember what happened and when they think they can, get it wrong. The third
problem is that in high-profile cases, including frauds, witnesses come forward with false or
malicious evidence to get their moment of glory or payment.

This section is concerned with getting reliable evidence from willing and unwilling wit-
nesses in complex fraud cases and obtaining a written account of their evidence. This may be
in the form of a Proof of Evidence, affidavit, statement or CJA statement (see page 438) and is
required by lawyers to assess the strength of their case, pre-trial, and to know what the witness
is expected to say during it.

COGNITIVE INTERVIEWING

In olden days, statements would be taken by police officers, lawyers, investigators or even ac-
countants, based on simple question and answer interviews, which often contaminated the
witness’s memory or failed to produce accurate detail. The witness evidence in the assassina-
tion of President Kennedy illustrates the weaknesses.

Witness evidence is vital

Nowadays, more sophisticated methods are available, the most popular being ‘cognitive
interviewing’21 (CI) which was invented in the US by Geiselman and Fisher.22 CI is a little like
NLP to the extent that the phrase is often bandied around but seldom defined: ‘cognitive’,
much like ‘initiative’, ‘issue’ and ‘fury’, is a vogue word. The best explanation of what practi-
tioners mean by CI is paraphrased from a paper by Brian R. Clifford and Amina Memon23 as
follows:

21 Cognitive is defined as ‘knowing, perceiving or conceiving as an act or faculty distinct from emotion or volition …
a notion, intuition, perception.’
22 See R. Edward Geiselman and Ronald P. Fisher 1985, Interviewing Victims and Witnesses of Crime, National Institute
of Justice, Washington, USA
23 ‘Analysing Witness Testimony’, Brian R. Clifford and Amina Memon, Blackstone Press ISBN 1 85431 731 8