Forensic Transcription: How Confident False Beliefs about Language and Speech Threaten the Right to a Fair Trial in Australia

Abstract

Everyday knowledge about language and speech, or ‘folk linguistics’, incorporates a number of false beliefs that have a negative effect in a range of areas, nowhere more so than in the criminal justice system. One lesser known area where false beliefs have a major impact is forensic transcription (interpretation of indistinct covert recordings used as evidence in criminal trials). Without consultation of the linguistic sciences, the law has developed processes that allow police transcripts to ‘assist’ the courts in making out unintelligible covert recordings. The present article uses a case study of a real murder trial to bring the actual and potential injustice this creates to the attention of linguistic science, and examine the issues from a linguistics perspective. Having laid out the problem, it goes on to consider potential solutions, arguing that creating a better process requires deep collaboration between linguistics, law and law enforcement. From linguists, it requires improved theoretical understanding of the nature and structure of the false beliefs that underlie the existing legal processes, as well as development of a more general theoretical account of the process of transcription and the nature of transcripts.

Keywords:

• Forensic
• Transcription
• Folk Linguistics
• Interdisciplinary Communication
• Disputed Utterance

Acknowledgements

The present paper has benefitted indirectly from discussion with, and directly from comments by, a number of people, to all of whom I owe thanks: Alex Bowen, Kate Burridge, Felicity Cox, Diana Eades, Nick Enfield, Nick Evans, Peter French, Rod Gardner, Peter Gray, Georgina Heydon, David Nash, Phil Rose, Cindy Schneider, Roger Shuy, Lesley Stirling, Nick Thieberger, participants in several seminars and two anonymous reviewers. Of course, I remain solely responsible for any inaccuracies or infelicities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Unfortunately, there are few resources to enable proper quantification of cases involving covert recordings of various kinds used in various ways (see Fraser 2018b). The rarity of expert consultation can be seen informally by comparing the relatively small discipline of forensic phonetics with the enormous quantity of covert audio generated during investigations, and noting that, even within forensic phonetics, disputed utterance resolution is a minor branch: far more expert evidence is sought about speaker identification (French & Stevens, 2013).