| Volume
9, number 2 (December 2002)
Contents
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Joanna Kerr
Thompson
‘Powerful/powerless’
language in court: a critical re-evaluation of the Duke Language
and Law Programme
The Duke Language and
Law Programme, conducted in North Carolina in the 1970s, is still
widely cited as evidencing, most notably, that ‘powerless’
language used by witnesses in court adversely influences juror
evaluations of their credibility (Tiersma 1999; Gibbons 1994; Levi
and Walker 1990). This article will critically reappraise aspects
of Duke’s methodological design and query the group’s claims
regarding the impact of ‘powerless’ speech. It will further
suggest that in order to create a more established future role for
forensic linguists as ‘advisers’ to justice system
professionals and participants, the ‘duty of care’ owed by
linguists to their ‘clients’ must be more closely defined.
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Martha L. Komter
The suspect’s
own words: the treatment of written statements in Dutch courtrooms
In Dutch trials,
suspects are confronted with written statements they made to the
police and the investigating judge, earlier in the criminal law
process, as recorded in the case files. These statements are
supposed to be written down as far as possible in the suspect’s
own words, but they are in fact the police officer’s written
versions of what was said in the interrogating room. They are
simultaneously reports of previous talks held in the police
interrogating room and part of the interaction in the courtroom,
both of which are conducted for a different purpose. Thus,
suspects are held accountable for what they supposedly told the
police, and if they argue with this, judges can rebut their
protests by pointing out that they themselves have told this to
the police.
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Susan Ehrlich
(Re)contextualizing
complainants’ accounts of sexual assault
By comparing data
from a sexual assault criminal trial and a sexual assault civil
trial, this article shows how counter-hegemonic frameworks can be
incorporated into institutional discourse. More specifically, I
explore the ways in which feminist discourses or ideological
‘frames’ regarding women and sexual violence can be introduced
into the discursive space of a trial, resulting in the
contextualizing of complainants’ experiences of sexual assault.
The article also illustrates how direct examination can serve to (re)structure
and (re)contextualize the testimony given by wittnesses in ways
which are not typically associated with direct examination
questioning strategies. While not an adversarial context, the
direct examination of the civil trial analysed here displayed
properties of trial discourse more often associated with
cross-examination.
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Philip Gaines
Negotiating power
at the bench: informal talk in sidebar sessions
The sidebar, a
conference between judge and attorney(s) out of the hearing of the
jury, functions primarily as a venue for arguments about evidence
admissibility in court. In the O. J. Simpson trial, there were
approximately 600 sidebars. A striking characteristic of many of
these conferences was the presence of a wide range of types of
informal talk, including personal insults, joking, threats and
compliments. Rather than seeing these departures from the official
business of the courtroom as extraneous and irrelevant, this study
suggests that attorneys use informal talk in sidebars
strategically in order to gain advantage with the judge through
profiling themselves as superior to their opponents and as sharing
solidarity with the judge.
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Conference Report:
Annual Meeting of the International Association for Forensic
Phonetics, Moscow State Linguistic University, 1–4 July 2002
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Index
to Volumes 8 and 9
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Book Reviews
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Forensic Linguistics is published by the University of Birmingham
Press.
User: WEIMING LIU
Session: 21555
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