The local Court Reporter from the York Dispatch has been sitting in on the re-trial of Brian Hummert at which Rob Leonard has been giving linguistic evidence.
The court report is worth reading for this line alone:
"Jurors didn't hear that Leonard was a founding member of doo-wop group Sha-Na-Na, or that he sang with the group at Woodstock."
Hmm... more prejudical than probative?
David Woolls' software CopyCatch, in its use by UCAS, is in the news again.
I'm never sure whether such rises in figures are a good thing -is the software detecting more plagiarists but their numbers remain stable? Or, are there ever-more students who copy?
David is a good friend of CFL and in the past has worked jointly on cases with us. 
More on the campaign to make the Public Order Act less insulting... 
New Scientist special section on psychology and law includes interesting article on interviewing and false confession.
You have to register to read but it is free! 
Is the Zodiac killer still alive?
Probably not, but who knows.
Anyhow, there's a new book book which claims he's alive and well aged 91 and living in California. Make your own mind up.
If you’ve not seen the film "Zodiac" however, that is well worth a look and as the original case was the inspiration for the plot of "Dirty Harry," there’s lots of interest for the film fan.
For the forensic linguist this article has a video clip attached with Jerry McMenamin discussing the Zodiac case and his work in forensic stylistics more generally. Another case for those lawyerly linguists... personally I can't see this defence suceeding.
An attempt at language reform of the law on the basis that the legal language is offensive...
The Queen's Speech has set out the government's legislative plans for the next year and it includes a Defamation Bill
A big win for libel reform campaigners
I'm speaking here on Saturday (why am I always on first thing!).
It looks like a good event with an interesting morning session on forensic linguistics. 
This is really good article from the Independent on the problems and rigours of court interpreting. The piece on interpreting got me looking through past programmes on Word of Mouth. I had missed this episode from a few weeks ago. In it Chris Ledgard examines how trademark law can control language and in particular the language of the Olympic games.
The whole programme is good but the more legal bit is about 12 minutes in. |
Kate Storey-Whyte analysed two texts to conclude they had the same author and that the 'facilitated communiation' of a learning disabled woman was in fact indistinguishable from the language of her therapist. 
This is a thoughtful article by Carl Miller, author of an important Demos paper on the ethics, policy and politics of social media intelligence.
The Demos paper can be downloaded from here: http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/intelligence
Next week (and every three months or so) I do a stint training undercover police officers in techniques for online identity assumption. The linguistics of this work is fascinating and touches on ideas of idiolect and the performance of our linguistic personas. The ethics are also somewhat interesting.
Most people I meet initially baulk at the idea of training police officers to be better at a being deceptive but for me there are two main reasons why I am happy to do this work. First, most of the work is clearly directed against those obvious bad guys - online paedophiles. I'm not, however, suggesting this application can provide unquestioning ethical cover for the work – the techniques I teach might be used in a variety of contexts some of which I’m sure I would struggle with. The second reassurance I have are the legal and policy frameworks which regulate these police officers' work. These frameworks seem to me to be on the whole well thought out. Again, on the one hand I'm not saying these frameworks cannot be twisted or ignored; and on the other hand I am not saying they can't be improved.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that as the internet matures, criminality on the internet will also mature, and in response, policy development for internet policing needs to be carefully thought through. And Carl Miller is one of those doing the thinking. 
This is already a great resource curated by David Allen Green aka @JackofKent and he promises to add to it as the Defamation Bill progresses through parliament.
Friday trivia:
Jack of Kent is a mythical British/Celtic figure who defeated the devil in a series of challenges. He won by careful wording of the deals he made with the devil and adhering to them to the letter of the law.
The legal tweeter/blogger @JackofKent is from Birmingham but he is well worth following for other reasons. I am not aware that he has made any bargins with the devil. 
There's a lot of attention on this at the moment with some cross-party MPs looking to repeal a law which prevents insulting language.
The law, I’d argue, is illiberal and ill-conceived – under section 5 of the Public Order Act “insulting” language is prohibited if it is deemed even “likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress". That is to say insults don’t have to actually cause "harassment, alarm or distress" – a judge or jury need only to come to the conclusion that such distress is likely.
Peter Tatchell, a prominent gay rights campaigner and supporter of the reform, gave a cracking interview yesterday morning on the BBC Today programme. He was repeatedly challenged to say that a series of increasingly offensive anti-gay insults should be criminalised but he refused to take the bait and throughout defended the right to freedom of speech. 
A commentary on my talk at the Portsmouth, Language in the Real World conference.
Erika Darics, the author of the blog was talking about how managers communicate with international teams over instant messenger and chat. Interestingly some of her management language features such 'floor-holding' (hitting return mid-clause or mid-sentence to deter interruptions) are also used by leaders and influencers in criminal enterprises. Here's Rob talking about the linguistic evidence in the Hummert case for a US TV programme.. 
It was in spring 2004 that someone strangled Charlene Hummert in her Fairview Township home. Forensic Linguist, Rob Leonard gave evidence in this case and it sounds as if he will have to again... 
Brooke Magnanti, drawing on the experiences of her alter ego Belle de Jour, writes on anonymous blogging. This makes for a really interesting read and although the suggestions are probably not entirely watertight this would be a great start for anyone who sought anonymity.
You may remember that Don Foster of UNABOMBER fame (who describes his approach as Literary Forensics) made a famous misattribution of Belle de Jour - described here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/mar/21/media.pressandpublishing
Foster's misattribution points to the need to recognise the lack of knowledge of population distributions of language features. This lack of knowledge is particularly important if you are going to attempt an open-set authorship attribution – which is why I try not to get drawn in to this sort of problem…
via @TimHarford 
Twitter is resisting an attempt by prosecutors to gain access to the message history of a writer and activist who was arrested during Occupy Wall Street protests last fall.
Twitter's argument is that the tweets don't belong to Twitter so they can't give them up. They argue that it is explicitly in twitter's terms and conditions that the ownership of tweets resides with the tweeters but Judge Sciarrino disagreed. If the judge’s ruling stands the tweets will not have the same legal protections as if they were owned by the suspect...
As well as this legal point it is interesting to me that twitter are institutionally reluctant to give up the tweets, presumably they feel they have a duty to protect their users and perhaps also duty to defend freedom of speech. 
Another twitter conviction under section 127 of the communications act. In this case the (unsucessful) argument was made by the defence that Zimmerman's computer may have been hacked and that he did not write the offending tweets. As far as I'm aware no linguist was employed to support or counter this suggestion. 
This is a bit intriguing to say the least.
Apparently the legal issue is whether clicking the "like" button on a Facebook page amounts to "expressive speech". If it does it would be protected under US freedom of speech laws. Previous rulings have held that writing on someone's Facebook page is protected.
As a linguist I would have to argue that clicking the like button is a purely expressive act, almost devoid of other content – the equivalent perhaps to cheering when your team scores a goal. It is clearly expressive but you might argue it is not speech?
I cannot think that a round of applause or a cheer at a sports game would not be protected but I’d be interested if there have been any such cases.
via @saclampitt This looks great - good luck to Luna and her colleagues for this initiative. |
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