A study of intentional insincerity in Malawian criminal justice

This chapter investigates the concept of intentional insincerity in witnesses’ responses. In court, witnesses are called to support the story for the party that has brought them. Their major task is therefore to provide responses to questions as they are asked during the examination-in-chief, cross-examination, and/or in re-examination. The law in
Malawi empowers lawyers (especially cross-examiners) to ask questions that usually exert pressure, control, trap, and sometimes injure the characters of the witnesses (Kondowe, 2020). It would be interesting, therefore, to see how witnesses handle and respond to such modes of questioning and whether or not they cooperate. To achieve this, this chapter borrows significantly from Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle (CP). Our model, the ‘Principle of Believability’, has also been employed to complement the
CP. To some extent, the focus of this chapter is to assess and show how non-cooperation, as a form of insincerity, leads to low believability of witness testimony.