From Behavioural Accounts To Legal Proof: Separating Behavioural Interpretation From Criminal Responsibility
Hasti Panchmatiya, BBA LLB (Hons.) MIT WPU School of Law Research Intern, Centre for Crime Sciences and Forensics Intelligence
ABSTRACT
Behavioural interpretation is increasingly relevant to criminal investigation, particularly in relation to deception, verbal behaviour, moral justification, interrogation and decision-making. The difficulty is not that behaviour has no investigative value, but that behavioural observations can acquire a significance greater than the underlying research permits. Hesitation, inconsistency, emotional expression, speech characteristics or apparent justification may provide reasons for further inquiry, but they do not, without more, establish that a person is lying or criminally responsible. This article examines the gap between behavioural interpretation and legal proof by synthesising research on criminal decision-making, account construction, neutralisation, moral disengagement, deception, interviewing and confession psychology with Indian constitutional and evidentiary law. It argues that behavioural science and criminal law answer different questions. Behavioural research can assist the formation and testing of investigative hypotheses; legal doctrine determines relevance, admissibility, evidentiary weight and the consequences that may legitimately follow. The article develops the Account-to-Proof Framework, comprising five stages: account- formation indicator, investigative test, corroboration, legal evaluation and alternative-hypothesis audit. The framework is intended to make inferential movement visible and reviewable rather than to provide a new method of lie detection. Its central proposition is that behavioural information should remain an input into investigation unless and until independently tested evidence satisfies the applicable legal requirements. The article therefore proposes an auditable separation between behavioural interpretation and legal responsibility.
Keywords: Behavioural Evidence, Criminal Investigation, Deception Detection, Account-to-Proof Framework, Legal Proof.
