Volume 7, number 1 (June 2000)

Janet Cotterill and Malcolm Coulthard
Introduction
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Janet Cotterill

Reading the rights: a cautionary tale of comprehension and comprehensibility

The UK police caution, delivered to suspects on arrest, has undergone a number of rewrites, most recently in 1995 as a reaction to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, 1994. This paper analyses the role played by police officers when delivering the caution in influencing its comprehensibility, by means of an in situ study of 100 detained persons and 50 police officers. Findings indicate that there is considerable variability in the paraphrases provided by officers, and that some paraphrases may in fact result in the explanation of suspects’ rights being less comprehensible than the caution itself. The paper argues that asking linguistically untrained officers to provide paraphrases which are graded for both language and comprehensibility is unreasonable; finally, the use of standardized paraphrases – along similar lines to pattern jury instructions – is discussed.
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Sonia Russell

‘Let me put it simply …’: the case for a standard translation of the police caution and its explanation

The police caution, in interviews with suspects, is not an isolated linguistic event. Rather, it constitutes a move in a discourse sequence that begins with the tape buzzer and ends at the point when the officer proceeds to the facts of the case. This paper examines the sequence leading up to the caution and the events that follow, including the officer’s explanation of the caution in ‘simple language’. Using tape-recorded data from twenty French interpreter-mediated interviews, it uses interpreters’ apparent difficulties as a lens through which to focus on the linguistic problems of the sequence. It also examines shifts between form-based and meaning-based interpreting, as the interpreter attempts to follow the officer’s ‘simplification’. Finally, it is suggested that a standard translation of the caution should be supplied to all police stations, together with a standard explanation, both in English and foreign languages.
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Bethany K. Dumas

US pattern jury instructions: problems and proposals

The syntactic and semantic difficulties faced by jurors in courtroom trials, particularly with respect to jury instructions, are well documented (see, e.g., Charrow and Charrow 1979; Steele and Thornburg 1988; Tiersma 1993). Given the clear consensus about the difficulties of dealing with long, complex sentences and specialized terms of art (e.g. reasonable doubt), it has been difficult to understand why the legal system has been so slow to modify the pattern instructions used in most US jurisdictions. This paper will recognize the advance in instructions represented by the introduction of pattern instructions, suggest reasons for the current inertia, identify chinks in the wall of resistance (notably in Arizona), and suggest a model for reform that draws upon the recognition that the role of the jury as finder of fact has to compete with the judicial perception that the jury must be highly constrained and controlled.
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Ian Langford

Forensic semantics: the meaning of 'murder', 'manslaughter' and 'homicide'

The purpose of this paper is to show how the meaning of an expression referring to a crime can be stated in simple words that anyone can understand. Judges need to explain to juries the meaning of the crime that the accused is charged with, the accused needs to understand it, interpreter and translator need to understand it, and of course, lawyers need to understand the charge when advising clients and when preparing for trial. This paper shows how the forensic linguist can help people involved in the criminal justice system to understand the meaning of expressions referring to crimes. This can be done by a method of analysis which represents meaning through about sixty basic English words and a simple syntax known to all speakers of English.
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Kirk P. H. Sullivan and Frank Schlichting

Speaker discrimination in a foreign language: first language environment, second language learners

A witness to a crime may be required to identify a speaker based on voice samples from a language which is not their first language. Previous experimental work has shown that knowledge of a language has an effect on an individual’s ability to identify speakers. This paper examines whether this ability increases over the course of the British four-year language degree. The results from a series of different open-test voice line-up presentations showed that listener ability improved on beginning to study a foreign language, yet showed no unambiguous improvement after the second semester of study.
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Book Reviews

Book reviews
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Forensic Linguistics is published by the University of Birmingham Press.