Silence in the police station: the marginalisation of Section 34

Section 34 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 permits adverse inferences to be drawn from a defendant's failure, when interviewed by the police, to mention facts that he or she later relies on in defence at trial. ne section was and remains a controversial restriction of the common law right to silence. This article argues that a combination of the Strasbourg jurisprudence on Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and increasingly restrictive interpretation by the English courts has resulted in the marginalisation of section 34. When inferences from silence in the police station are possible at all, they provide no more than support for an existing (clear) prima facie case.