Linguistics, Life, and Death

* Warning: Today’s episode contains discussions of murder and racial profiling *

Some time in the 2000s, somewhere in the USA. John Smith, an African American male defendant, has been accused of murder. While in jail awaiting trial, he makes a phone call to his cousin. It was believed John confessed to the murder. The defence disagreed, but needed linguistic assistance to help them. Elsewhere in the country, tragedy has struck. 7-year-old Leona Harris was attending a house party with her father, Robert. While standing in the front garden with some friends, they came under gunfire from a passing car. A number of the group were wounded – Leona and Robert fatally so. The police believed they had identified the gang responsible, and the individual who pulled the trigger, and brought him in to be interrogated. However, they needed more information to charge him with the murders. To obtain this, they approached a former member of the gang, Sidney Brown, to help them gather new evidence to arrest the prime suspect – Marcus Jeffreys. Sidney was provided with a mobile phone and instructed to call Marcus, the conversation being recorded and later transcribed. The prosecution’s case was that the transcript clearly showed Marcus agreeing to the proposition that he had committed the murders. Marcus’s defence disagreed.

In today’s episode, our hosts Dr Nicci MacLeod and Professor Tim Grant are joined by Professor of Linguistics John Baugh. He’s come to talk to us about his type of linguistic profiling, which occurs when someone’s speech triggers discriminatory bias against them. Through a discussion of two cases John has worked on, he explains how his expertise tackled linguistic evidence in the US criminal justice system.

For a list of our sources and more information about this case, please visit https://www.aston.ac.uk/writing-wrongs

Have a question for Nicci or Tim? Email us at [email protected] and we may answer it during an upcoming episode!

Check out the official AIFL blog for more forensic linguistic goodies here: https://medium.com/@AIFLblog

If you have been affected by any of the themes in this week’s episode, please contact one of these free sources:

https://www.samaritans.org/how-we-can-help/contact-samaritan/ https://www.helpguide.org/find-help

Production Team: Jordan Robertson, Neus Alberich Buera, Karolina Placzynta, James Cresswell Sound: James Cresswell Editing: Angela Walker Visual design: George Grant With our thanks to Professor John Baugh

Professor Tim Grant’s home page: Tim Grant - Aston Research Explorer

Dr Nicci MacLeod’s home page: Nicci MacLeod - Aston Research Explorer

Professor John Baugh’s home page: John Baugh | Faculty | The People of Rice | Rice University

Professor John Baugh’s book: Linguistics in Pursuit of Justice

Center for African and African American Studies at Rice University

Academic resources

Baugh, J. (2016). Linguistic profiling and discrimination. The Oxford handbook of language and society, 349-368.

Cotterill, J. (2003). Language and power in court: A linguistic analysis of the OJ Simpson trial. Springer.

Dixon, J. A., Mahoney, B., & Cocks, R. (2002). Accents of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race, and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21(2), 162-168.

Fraser, H. (2020). Forensic transcription: The case for transcription as a dedicated branch of linguistic science. In The Routledge handbook of forensic linguistics (pp. 416-431). Routledge.

OJ Simpson Trial Transcript http://simpson.walraven.org/jul12.html

Other resources

BBC 2016, “Renting while black,” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-35464634.

The Fair Housing Act Resources