The Interweaving of Talk and Text in a French Criminal Pretrial Hearing

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the talk between a suspect and a prosecutor during a pretrial hearing within the framework of the French criminal procedure of comparution immediate (immediate trial). In this hearing, according to the law, the prosecutor is supposed to verify the suspect's identity, inform the suspect of the charges against him or her, and write down the suspect's statements if he or she chooses to make any.1 However, most of this meeting is taken up by a prosecutor-led discussion during which interlocutors display accounts of the alleged facts, produce series of questions and answers, dispute issues related to the case, and formulate the suspect's statement in written form. I show that this statement, overseen carefully by the prosecutor, emerges through the interweaving of different sequential activities, with talk and text reflexively constituting one another, in a restrictive speech exchange system fitted to the prosecutor's institutional orientations mainly with respect to building the case against the suspect.