Abolishing the right of silence

Abstract

In the summer of 1987 the then Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, delivered the Police Foundation Lecture (Hurd, 1987). He resurrected a topic which ‘most people, police, lawyers and public alike thought had been dead and buried these last ten years' (Morton, 1987). The so-called right to or of silence, left intact by the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure (1981), was on the agenda for criminal justice reform again, resuming the position it held with the publication of what Zander (1985) called ‘the ill-fated and notorious eleventh report of that prestigious Committee' (Criminal Law Revision Committee, 1972).