Bases of Forensic Pathology Expert Testimony With Emphasis on Iowa v Tyler

Judicial scrutiny of the forensic sciences is increasing. This scrutiny targets the bases for expert opinions. Forensic pathologists must understand that when they express an opinion it must have an articulable underlying basis. Iowa v Tyler provides a cautionary tale where testimony from a forensic pathologist on the cause and manner of death based exclusively on police reports and audio and video recordings of police interviews of the suspect rather than on medical evidence were held to be inadmissible. Tyler has an odd and distinguishable set of facts, but has been widely cited as an example of problematic forensic pathology testimony.

Interpreting Intercepted Communication: A Sui Generis Translational Activity

Legal wiretapping has gained importance in law enforcement along with the development of information and communication technology. Understanding the language of intercepted persons is essential for the success of a police investigation. Hence, intercept interpreters, as we suggest calling them in this article, are hired. Little is known about this specific work at the interface between language and law. With this article, we desire to contribute to closing this gap by focussing particularly on the translational activity. Our study identifies a fragmented field of research due to the difficulty in accessing workers in this specific field who interpret in a highly confidential phase of criminal investigations. The findings, which are drawn from scarce studies and our empirical data derived from an online questionnaire for a pilot study in Switzerland, demonstrate the wide range of the performed activity intercept interpreting. This article is the first to present translational activity from the perspective of intercept interpreters. The activity differs in many ways from interpretation in court hearings or police interviews. Hence, we suggest categorising interlingual intercept interpretation as a translational activity sui generis and—since previous research has not done justice to the ethical and deontological questions that intercept interpretation raises—advocate for further transdisciplinary research in this field of translation.

Themes and methodological issues in Court Interpreting research

The field of Legal Interpreting encompasses a wide variety of contexts including police interviews and interrogations, lawyer-client conferences, tribunal and court hearings and trials. Most of the research carried out in the field to date has concentrated on the discourse of the courtroom in Common Law countries (Berk-Seligson 1988, 1990, 1999; Hale 1997b, 1999, 2004; Mason & Stewart 2001; Pym, 1999; Rigney 1997). This is partly due to the availability of the data, as most courtrooms are open to the public, but also due to the vast amount of research conducted into the language of the courtroom, which has served as a theoretical basis for the study of court interpreting. These studies draw on discourse analysis, the ethnography of language, pragmatics, experimental psychology and forensic linguistics to inform their methods. Other research into legal interpreting has looked at other , non-linguistic aspects of the practice, such as role perceptions and expectations, using social science methods of surveys, interviews and focus groups (Fowler 1997; Kelly 2000; Hale & Luzardo 1997; Angelelli 2004). Fewer studies have concentrated on the other aspects of legal interpreting, such as police interpreting (Krouglov 1999; Berk-Seligson 2000; Russell 2004; Wadensjš 1997) and tribunal hearings (Wadensjš 1992; Mason & Stewart 2001; Barsky 1996). With the exception of a limited number of experimental studies (Berk-Seligson 1990 and Hale 2004) most legal interpreting research studies have been descriptive, qualitative and speculative, providing useful information on the current state of affairs but little on the impact such practices have on the legal process. This contribution will concentrate only on court interpreting research. It will review the major research projects to date, highlight their strengths and weaknesses, identify the gaps that exist in our knowledge of the field andproposefurther research studies tofill such gaps.

The Challenges of Forensic Linguistic Analysis of False Testimony

The present paper arises from wider research which focused on various manifestations of destructive and malicious speech behavior in spontaneous oral or written dialogs, related to the processes of information concealment and falsification in police interviews and court testimonies. A number of analytical methods were used to generate this paper: a retrospective analysis of scientific literature, comparative legal and logical analysis, extrapolation methods, and content analysis. Despite numerous experimental researches devoted to acoustic-phonetic or psycholinguistic features of lies, their results are not sufficiently reliable for forensic purposes as the expert report should not rely on assumptions. The author disputes the evidence admissibility of experts’ conclusions about utterances implying speech parameters correlating with lies detected via psycholinguistic examination in oral speech audio or video recording of a police interview or a court testimony. Forensic psycholinguistic methods and comprehensive algorithms used in some forensic experts’ reports to detect speech signs of lying demonstrate a great variety that contradicts with the principals of evidence admissibility. The insufficient development of the currently used expert approach and the lack of a unified methodology for solving expert tasks on a strictly scientific basis creates a demand for developing comprehensive methods for studying lies on the basis of forensic speech science and cognitive theory.

Rapport building and witness memory: Actions may ‘speak’ louder than words

Building rapport during police interviews is argued as important for improving on the completeness and accuracy of information provided by witnesses and victims. However, little experimental research has clearly operationalised rapport and investigated the impact of rapport behaviours on episodic memory. Eighty adults watched a video of a mock crime event and 24-hours later were randomly allocated to an interview condition where verbal and/or behavioural (non-verbal) rapport techniques were manipulated. Memorial performance measures revealed significantly more correct information, without a concomitant increase in errors, was elicited when behavioural rapport was present, a superiority effect found in both the free and probed recall phase of interviews. The presence of verbal rapport was found to reduce recall accuracy in the free recall phase of interviews. Post-interview feedback revealed significant multivariate effects for the presence of behavioural (only) rapport and combined (behavioural + verbal) rapport. Participants rated their interview experience far more positively when these types of rapport were present compared to when verbal (only) rapport or no rapport was present. These findings add weight to the importance of rapport in supporting eyewitness cognition, highlighting the potential consequences of impoverished social behaviours for building rapport during dyadic interactions, suggesting ‘doing’ rather than simply ‘saying’ may be more beneficial.