Consequences of Choice: Exploring Successful and Unsuccessful Decision-Making Attributes in UK Homicide Investigations

Flawed decision-making is widely identified as having led to miscarriages of justice and failed homicide investigations. This research explores decision-making by Senior Investigating Officers in UK homicide investigations, including where initial investigations were unsuccessful, or resulted in wrongful convictions. It offers a new ‘investigative continuum’ perspective as a means to explore decisions and for linking the impact of decisions to successful or unsuccessful outcomes. Using this model, it correlates ‘explorative’, ‘creative’ and ‘impactive’ decisions with positive investigative outcomes. It corroborates ‘tipping points’ in decision-making processes, identifies a new feature, ‘Transition Points’, and observes how these can affect investigative outcomes.