Police-suspect interrogation is a strategically adversarial engagement thatinvolves tactical deployment of a variety of discourse strategies. This situationbecomes more complex in a multilingual context like Nigeria where the interlocutorshave the opportunity of expressing their communicative intents in a multiplicity ofcodes. This paper focuses on the pragmatic ways code-switching (CS) is deployedby interrogators and suspects as a socio-pragmatic discourse strategy to achievetheir institutional and personal goals. We will see that CS is used persuasively, asinterrogators and suspects negotiate from positions of power and inferiority, drawingon socio-cultural norms and expectations. 30 audio-recorded interrogations at theỌ̀̀yọ́and Oǹdó state commands of the Nigeria Police form the primary data. All theinterrogations were conducted primarily in Nigerian English and the subjects were18 years or above. CriticalDiscourse Analysis and CommunicationAccommodationTheory are adopted for analysis and discussion. Findings show that code-switchingis employed with different effects for different participants: for interrogators to warn,threaten, and perform verbally aggressive acts that attack suspects’ self-worth; forsuspects to plead for mercy and to blame-shift; and for both to boost credibilityand authority, and to highlight socio-cultural shared knowledge. Swearing andcursing also take place within CS with suspects using self- and other-cursing toindicate sincerity and to try to persuade interrogators to believe their claims andwith interrogators swearing to express their commitment and determination to followthrough with a course of action. CS is, therefore, seen as a marked and strategiccommunicative alignment that is motivated by institutional and personal goals andused for persuasive purposes

This paper concerns interpreter-mediated courtroom hearings inDenmark. Based on audio-recordings, we analyse the contributions of judgeand interpreter, and we focus on if, how and by whom the non-Danish speakingaccused is informed about the possibility to speak with a lawyer in private.Although legally trivial, this information is crucial to the accused as it concernshis/her legal rights and options. We show how the informational sequenceunfolds interactionally; we argue that the work of judge and interpreter iscollaborative; and we discuss the potential of our sociolinguistic / interactionalperspectives to inform the legal professionals. Here we are concerned witha wide-spread understanding of quality in legal interpreting. Rather thanregarding ‘quality’ as equal to ‘correct’ and ‘accurate’ translation and focusingon the work of the interpreter in isolation, we suggest that it is necessary toconsider context, aims, addressees and functions of the interpreting activity. Weargue that the interpreter’s work facilitates better understanding for the accused,and at the same time, a more streamlined courtroom interaction

Police officers anticipate the evidential function and the absentaudience while interviewing and recording investigative interviews. Thisaudience consists of judges charged with taking procedural decisions based,among other things, on their reception of these written records. Qualitativestudies have revealed that interviewers use confrontational questions tocommunicate their doubt regarding the interviewee’s credibility to the audience,and that they formulate the questions in the written record more confrontationallythan in the actual interview for the same reason. However, so far, insufficientknowledge exists about the intended effect: Is the audience receptive to thepolice officer’s doubt when reading the written record? Our paper reportsan experiment testing the effects of this confrontational questioning style. Theresults show that there is, indeed, a communicative (inter-)action transcendingthe police investigative interview room: the audience is receptive to the policeofficer’s doubt transmitted via the questioning style reported in the writtenrecord

This paper aims to investigate the overall structural organization of apreliminary hearing in the Special Criminal Court, a court which is responsi-ble for judging misdemeanor cases. The research is based on the theoretical-methodological approach of Conversation Analysis (Sackset al.2003 1974),focusing on studies of institutional talk-in-interaction (Drew e Heritage 1992;Roberts e Sarangi 2005; Robinson 2013), as well as combining concepts fromInteractional Sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1999; Gumperz, J.J. 2002). The resultsshow four phases: opening, that occurs when the conciliator takes a roll call andgreets the parties; presentation of the problem, which happens when they explainlegal concepts to laypeople; offering to file the case, when the conciliator triesto persuade the parties to file and close the case; and ending, that takes placewhen the parties sign the paper agreement

The police caution in England and Wales is a compulsory elementof every police interview that informs suspects of their right to silence andoutlines the concept of adverse inference. This research draws on authenticdata from interviews with 17- and 18-year-old suspects from two English policeforces, analysing how the cautioning exchanges are negotiated while consideringsuspects’ ages and legal statuses as children and adults, respectively. Taking aninductive approach rooted in conversation analysis, the findings reveal an overalltendency for interviewers to explain the caution directly after reciting it, therebyacting on a presumption of suspects’ non-comprehension. It is also consideredhow the (discursive) presence of appropriate adults in interviews with juvenilescan complicate the interactions. The study sheds light on the experiences of anunder-researched group of interviewees and discusses the implications of thesefindings on police practice and vulnerable persons’ access to justice.

The commercial bail bond industry is one of the most profitable as-pects of America’s highly marketized criminal justice system that is increasinglyshaped by neoliberal structures and ideologies. Drawing on a specialised corpusof “Home” and “About Us” pages from bail bond websites, this paper is the firstempirical linguistic examination of commercial bail bonds discourse grounded inits legal context. Using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, we examinehow bail bond companies 1) discursively present and promote their services, 2)represent the legal system and its processes, and 3) construe arrest and detentionto prospective service users. The findings show that bail bond companies positiontheir services as an unobjectionably common (Brookes and Harvey 2017a) partof legal and financial self-management by normalising, legitimising, and idealis-ing their use whilst seeking to minimise the power-imbalance between themselvesand their often financially and socially disempowered ‘clients’. By grounding ourlinguistic analysis in a legal context, we demonstrate that these discourses simul-taneously serve whilst oppress those they purport to help, offering an example ofa local form of structural violence that subtly perpetuates neoliberal agendas anda two-tier justice system.

Recent research (Haworth 2018) has demonstrated how investigativeinterview data are (unintentionally) distorted as they pass through the criminaljustice system, and the survey-based experiment we present here was designedto test our hypothesis that various aspects of the processing of police-suspectinterview data may have an impact on the quality of the official evidentialdocument produced. The quantitative and qualitative findings from thisexperiment shed light on, and provide a sound evidence base for this claim, ratherthan leaving it as an untested assumption. The experiment was designed totest each key aspect of the current process of the production of routine writtentranscripts of investigative interviews (ROTIs), focusing on the conversion fromspoken to written format, and the use of different transcription conventions, andit has enabled us to investigate which changes make the most difference in termsof the evidential quality of the end product, in order to effect a change in practicewhich will reduce or eliminate the effect of those changes. Our findings suggestthat when presented with a transcript of a police interview, we are significantlymore likely to (1) perceive the interviewee as anxious and unrelaxed, (2) interpretthe interviewee’s behaviour as being agitated, aggressive, defensive, and nervous,(3) determine that the interviewee is un-calm and uncooperative, and (4) deemthe interviewee’s version of events to be untrue, than we are if we listen to theoriginal audio recording. Moreover, subjects identified (a) consistency, (b) phraseand lexical choice, (c) emotion (crying/upset), (d) hesitation and/or pauses assignificant factors influencing participants’ perception and interpretation of theinterviewee and their story. This is particularly concerning as the latter twofeatures are not currently routinely included in police transcripts, and Haworth(2018) illustrates multiple ways in which transcripts might differ from the originalaudio recordings they are intended to replace, with respect to words and phrases,as well as general content. The findings presented in this paper provide a strongmotivation for further research into how we capture spoken interaction in legalcontexts, and they constitute something of a mandate for reform with respect tothe transcription of police interviews in the UK.

The Aston Forensic Linguistic Databank (FoLD) is a permanent,controlled access online repository for forensic linguistic data. We broadlyunderstand forensic linguistics as any academic research with a potential toimprove the delivery of justice through the analysis of language. FoLD thuscomprises a wide range of datasets with relevance to forensic linguistics andlanguage and law, including commercial extortion letters, investigative interviewsin police and other contexts, legal documents, forum posts from far-right onlinegroups, and comment threads from political blogs. This paper outlines how FoLDworks and its potential impact on the general discipline of forensic linguistics.