著者

土井 隆義

出版者

日本犯罪社会学会

雑誌

犯罪社会学研究 (ISSN:0386460X)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, pp.102-121, 1988

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This paper studies the mechanism of the construction of an offender's motive during criminal investigation and prosecution as a statement by which to interpret his acts. Motives are constructed after the fact as interpretations of acts and are attributed to the actor. The criminal investigation and prosecution process adapts concrete offenses to abstract categories of crime. This process is a public ex post facto interpretation of offensive acts. Therefore an offender's motive is constructed during the criminal proceedings and is attributed to him. In other words, an offender's motive is not a psychological fact which existed at the empirical scene of the crime, but a product which is spun out of the communication between a representative of authority and a deviant actor. From this standpoint, the suspect's confession, the report of the criminal investigation and the trial in criminal court are analyzed. As an actor is an interpreter of his own acts, the confession of a motive by a suspect must be viewed not as venting a pre-existing psychological fact but as an attempt to account for his offensive conduct. This work is done under the case-solving-frame furnished by the investigator in the interrogation process, so the statement of motive constructed in this situation is constrained by the view of the authorities. Furthermore, the statement of motive fixed in the report of the investigation cannot be reduced to the suspect's past mental state at the scene of the crime, because the spoken words in the confession are transformed into written words in the report, and the information is limited by this conversion. Therefore the verdict in court is given not to the act itself but to the concept which was granted to it during the investigation. Since the offender's motive does not belong to the past empirical world, this verdict is actually a technical simplification of the multiple reality of the crime. The work of achieving a verdict is also a search for the motive of the suspect according to 'taken-for-granted ideas.' Thus the offender, an object attributed a deviant motive, comes to be categorized as the anonymous person type "criminal."