Suspect is the person or thing whose guilt is suspected, as in an accused criminal or unidentified body. A suspect is also someone who has been formally charged with a crime, either by a police officer filing an information or a grand jury or judge passing true bills or indictments and binding over for trial.

In investigative interviews, suspects are able to provide their side of the story about a crime they might have committed and defend themselves against allegations of involvement or complicity in the event. The interviews are conducted in order to establish what the alleged crime was, who was involved, and whether it was a crime at all. In the US, a criminal investigation can only be launched if a person is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime or being about to commit one.

The present study explores the role of formulations in shaping and developing suspects’ statements during an interrogation. Formulations are a way of summarizing the information that has been communicated by the suspect in their previous free statement, and they can be proposed at several points in the conversation by interviewing officers. The interviews are transcribed and analysed according to conversation analytical transcription conventions, and the resulting transcripts show how the suspect responds to each of the proposed formulations. The responses vary in their format, ranging from preferred responses (performing the structural response preference of confirmation agreeing with the interviewing officer’s interpretation) to non-preferred resistance formatted with more dispreference markers. This article presents a series of extracts of these conversations, beginning with the production of a formulation by the interviewing officer and showing how the subsequent turns of the interaction problematize its accuracy in representing the suspect’s preceding talk.