Ghostwriters of crime narratives: Constructing the story by referring to intercept interpreters’ contributions in criminal case files

In our paper, we examine the role of intercept interpreters in this storytelling. To do so, we employ the framework of narrative criminology, which has demonstrated the importance of stories for understanding both crimes and justice. Whereas previous research in the area of criminal justice focused on court rooms and police stations to study the making of the narrative, in this study we investigate the paperwork of case files. We then empirically analyze the mentioned textual strategies of criminal justice agents when referring to the contributions of intercept interpreters in order to examine whether the narrative deployed in the case file blurs or downplays the active role of intercept interpreters. Our study is based on material that derives from four case files from Swiss prosecutors in two French-speaking cantons in Switzerland to which we were given complete access. This material and our narrative criminological approach will increase our knowledge about how to critically reconstruct the narrative deployed in the case file of a criminal procedure.