IMPORTANCE OF FORENSIC LINGUISTICS IN CRIME INVESTIGATION

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आभ्यंतर (Aabhyantar)      SCONLI-12  विशेषांक         ISSN : 2348-7771

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29. IMPORTANCE OF FORENSIC LINGUISTICS IN CRIME INVESTIGATION

Pournima Ravindra Bagade Department of Linguistics, Indian and Foreign Languages,

R. T. M. N. U. Nagpur.

Abstract:

Forensic Science is the application of various sciences and technologies for the purpose of justice. In forensic science, linguistics also has a one of the major role in criminal investigation as well as in legal proceedings. Forensic Linguistics is the branch of linguistics which studies written and spoken language for legal procedures. It is the interface between language and law in judicial & law enforcement settings. Forensic Linguistics has three main aspects in crime investigation. First is the language of the legal texts, which analyses the language of the documents like Acts of Parliament, wills, court judgments and summonses and the statutes of States and Government departments. Second is language of the legal procedures where language used in court, evidence presentation, interview and interrogation techniques, recording of statements, etc. Both attempt to make legal language more comprehensible to everyone and third is the analysis of the language when language itself submitted in court of law as evidence in the cases like analysis of suicide notes, anonymous threat letters, audio or video records, in civil cases like contract disputes, deceptive trade practices, defamation and in intellectual property right cases like trademark, copyright infringement, plagiarism and authorship attribution.

Keywords: Forensic Science, Linguistics, Crime, Language, Law, Evidence, Analysis, Pragmatics, Discourse, Stylistics, Authorship, Copyright, Trademark, Plagiarism, Investigation, Acts, Justice

Introduction:

Forensic linguistics concerns the analysis of written and spoken language for legal purposes. The phrase Forensic Linguistics first appeared in 1968 when Jan Svartvik, a professor of linguistics, used it in an analysis of statements by Timothy John Evans. It is a branch of applied linguistics. Analyses are done both for investigative purposes and when a specimen is due to be presented as evidence in court. The basic fact for the use of Forensic Linguistics in crime investigation is that as like every individual is unique, his language irrespective may be written or spoken is unique to himself. No two individuals write or speak exactly the same way or no individual write or speak the same way all the time. Linguistics also shows uniqueness in the construction of our laws of the land. Our laws should be coded in such a characteristic language which aims to understand law codes correctly and giving accurate judgement. And this makes the linguistics analysis important in crime investigation.

Forensic linguistics has three main branches of study in crime investigation which are as follows:

1. Language of the legal texts,

2. Language of the legal process, and

3. Language as evidence.

1. Language of the legal texts

When we read our Constitution, Indian Penal Code, Criminal Procedural Code or any other legal document, we find that all these legal materials are constructed in certain characteristic language which contains vast amount of information explained in minimum amount of words, which helps to handle and study all these documents easily. But the use of these characteristic words in making the statements of these laws may cause differences in understanding their meaning other than their meaning intended. And this is where linguistics plays its role. All these legal documents are constructed with proper morphological, syntactical, semantics and pragmatics rules. So that exact meaning is drawn according to a case. Understanding legal style is therefore one of the many interpretative skills that needs to be acquired in order to make sense of legal texts.

The relationship between the two abstract notions, language on the one hand and the law on the other are keys to understanding how linguists can contribute to the forum of the law. It has often been said that the law is the language that enshrines it. Not only do we need language to frame the law, but we need language also to understand the law. Law and language are inseparable.

The legal texts include a language which contains certain technical terminologies, archaic, formal, and unusual or difficult vocabulary (such as said/aforesaid, hereinafter), impersonal constructions (avoidance first or second person addressing), passive constructions, multiple negation, long and complex sentences. All these features are often collectively called legalese. It is interesting to observe that when the literature refers to features of legal language, it is almost always in reference to written legal language. One important difference between spoken language and written text is that writing tends to be more permanent than speech. This is certainly true of legal texts, which on occasion remain in force for hundreds of years.

Example:

Indian Penal Code, 1860 is a main criminal code of India. It is a comprehensive code intended to cover all substantive aspects of criminal law. It is called as subjective code as it contains definition of each act with its proper illustration. It also contains punishments in separate sections after the definition of the act. It contains 511 sections comprising in 23 chapters.

Section 415:

Cheating- Whoever, by deceiving any person, fraudulently or dishonestly induces the person so deceived to deliver any property to any person, or to consent that any person shall retain any property, or intentionally induces the person so deceived to do or omit to do anything which he would not do or omit if he were not so deceived, and which act or omission causes or is likely to cause damage or harm to that person in body, mind, reputation or property, is said to “cheat”.

Illustrations

(a) A, by falsely pretending to be in the Civil Service, intentionally deceives Z, and thus dishonestly induces Z to let him have on credit goods for which he does not mean to pay. A cheats.

Section 417:

Punishment for cheating- Whoever cheats shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with fine, or with both.

Here in the above example, Section 415, IPC explains what is a fraud „cheating‟. This section explains cheating to a person which means for a personal gain fraudulently or dishonestly making a person to believe which is not true to deliver any property to any person, or make his consent so he retain any property or intentionally inducing a person to do a certain action or omit to do that action which the person cheated never do or may do if he is not cheated, or this act or omission of that act harms to the person physically, psychologically, or his reputation and property got damaged. And later on in the Section 417, IPC it explains the „punishment‟ for the fraud cheating which if proved then the criminal should be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to one year, or with a certain amount of fine according to the intensity of the crime, or sometimes imprisonment and fine both may be imposed. This indicates how any type of act is explained in a particular characteristic language studying it enables us to draw above such wide amount information.

2. Language of the legal process

In any criminal or civil case the legal processes starts at first from arresting the criminal to giving final verdict. This starts from writing First Information Report, issuing warrant, interview and interrogation of criminals, recording of statements made by criminals, evidence presentation in courts, sending summons, questioning in courts like in examination-in-chief, cross-examination or re-examination up to sentencing any punishment or acquaintance of an accused. At each process language plays its major role. There is a certain fixed format of all these processes and has a particular language which may not be change. For example in trials examination-in-chief, cross-examination or re-examination have a fixed sequence and cannot be interchanged. They are named according the type of questions in them are asked. Leading questions must not be asked in examination-in-chief but be asked in cross-examination by opposite party (section 138 I.E.A. 1872).

Even when a common witness or an expert witness appears in court for giving testimony then they first have to take an oath which also has linguistics sense. When a suspect is interrogated then what statements he made in accepting his guilt or denying it, police officer should record these statements exactly what are stated by the accused. This evidence comes in two forms- records of interviews with suspect and records of statements made by suspects. Police should not alter these records by their knowledge as it may cause wrongful verdict.

Case Study:

Derek Bentley case-

This case shows us how wrongful recording of statements kills the justice. This was the case of Derek Bentley, 19 years boy who hanged in the allegation of guilty of encouraging murder. It was in 2nd November 1952. Two teenage boys, Christopher Craig and Derek Bentley tried to rob a factory in Croydon. They were both extremely inept criminals. A neighbor spotted them on the factory roof and called the police. Derek Bentley was aged 19 but had a mental age of about 11 and Christopher Craig was aged 16. The police arrived on the factory roof and Derek was arrested. Derek had no idea Chris was armed. Chris started shooting but one police said him “Now come on, son. Don‟t be silly. Hand that over,” But Chris shot him, hitting him in the head and killing him instantly. Here was the prosecution case against Derek: it was alleged he shouted “Give it to him, Chris. Let him have it.” The prosecution said this meant “shoot the police officer”. Bentley‟s defense said it meant “let him have the gun, hand it over to him. But actually Bentley never uttered any those words. This was never raised at the trial and Bentley was sentenced to death, with a recommendation of mercy. Despite a huge petition, the protests of many influential people, and a last-minute appeal, Derek Bentley was hanged and in contrast Craig was sentenced to be detained at Her Majesty‟s Pleasure and he was released after ten years at age twenty-six living quietly out of the public glare. But he resurfaced briefly one time that Bentley had never said „Let him have it, Chris! But this causes injustice with Derek Bentley which leads him to capital punishment.

3. Language as evidence

Language is, today, an inseparable part of human society. Language is a means of communication. Human civilization has been possible only through language. It is through language only that humanity has come out of the Stone Age and has developed science, art and technology in a big way. And this same language often times also used as evidence in forensic investigation to find out who is a criminal.

Language got the view of evidence when it is present in suicide notes, anonymous threat letters, audio or video records, in contract disputes, deceptive trade practices, defamation and in, copyright infringement, plagiarism and authorship attribution. And this linguistics analysis is made only due its uniqueness to each individual. As each individual speaks, writes in a unique way and no one can imitate this uniqueness. Language can be analyzed as an evidence with use various branches of Linguistics like stylistics, morphology, idiolect, syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

Stylistics Analysis:

Forensic stylistics as it is sometimes called, applies linguistic techniques to legal and criminal issues. This discipline subjects written or spoken materials (or both), to scientific analysis for determination and measurement of content, meaning, or determination of authorship.

Stylistics is the examination of style in language including structuring sentences or use of particular vocabulary for the purpose of resolving litigated questions relating to disputed authorship or meaning. It is based on the fact that everyone has unique style of language both in speaking and writing. Authorship measures that analysts use include word length average, average number of syllables per word, article frequency, type-token ratio, punctuation (both in terms of overall density and syntactic boundaries) and the measurements of hapax legomena (unique words in a text).

Sometimes study of spelling mistakes also indicate a particular style of writing narrowing to the detection of a particular writer.

Example:

Stylistics analysis mostly happens in cases of plagiarism. Plagiarism is the violation of the Intellectual Property Rights of the true author. Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else's work and publishing it as your own. This includes text, and even ideas. Whenever another person's work is copied and republished without an appropriate reference or citation, it is considered plagiarism. This mostly happens in writing Research thesis, Projects, Dissertation or even in writing books. Stylistics analysis helps to find out true author.

We live in a time when most information is available in a digital format. While this makes it easier to access information than ever before, it also makes it easier to plagiarize other people's work. All it takes is a simple copy operation to copy large amounts of text or images from another source. This content can be pasted into a document or another publication in a matter of seconds. Anyone with a website can potentially republish the content for the whole world to see, without citing the original author. Because it is so easy to copy and paste digital information, plagiarism in the information age has become a serious problem. Fortunately, there are laws in place to protect against plagiarism. The most notable is international copyright law, which states that each individual's published work is automatically protected by copyright. This means others cannot copy the work without the author's approval and can be held liable for breaking the law if they do so.

Idiolect Analysis:

The identification of whether a given individual said or wrote something relies on analysis of their idiolect, or particular patterns of language use (vocabulary, collocations, pronunciation, spelling, grammar, etc). The idiolect is a theoretical construct based on the idea that there is linguistic variation at the group level and hence there may also be linguistic variation at the individual level.

In the analysis of a crime, it is important to study the written or spoken language of the perpetrator, as it can offer insight into the offender's age, race, gender, level of education, religious or spiritual beliefs, geographic and socioeconomic background, culture, and ethnicity.

Firstly, language is not an inherited property, but one which is socially acquired. Because acquisition is continuous and lifelong, an individual's use of language is always susceptible to variation from a variety of sources, including other speakers, the media and macro-social changes. Education can have a profoundly homogenizing effect on language use. Research into authorship identification is ongoing. The term authorship attribution is now felt to be too deterministic.

The paucity of documents (ransom notes, threatening letters, etc) in most criminal cases in a forensic setting means there is often too little text upon which to base a reliable identification. However, the information provided may be adequate to eliminate a suspect as an author or narrow down an author from a small group of suspects.

The Cusum (Cumulative Sum) method for text analysis has also been developed. Cusum analysis works even on short texts and relies on the assumption that each speaker has a unique set of habits, thus rendering no significant difference between their speech and writing. Speakers tend to utilize two to three letter words in a sentence and their utterances tend to include vowel-initial words.

Semantics and Pragmatics study:

It is the study of meaning in words and sentences, meaning in words. Focus of the semantic analysis in forensic linguistic is one of the interpretation of language that is very difficult to understand.

It is the study of speakers intended meaning of word, sentence, phrases, and language. Pragmatic is the imported forensic linguistic area because speaker and writer do not use always same words with the meaning that they want to convey. Listener and reader may also be unsuccessful in matching of expression of intended meaning. Forensic linguists use the theoretical tools provided by discourse analysis and pragmatics to analyze the function of language used in specific contexts, such as dictation, conversations, hearings, questioning, and the language of specific speech acts, e.g., threats, promises, warnings, etc. Other frequent application relate to the analysis of meaning in documents such as wills, insurance policies, contracts, agreements, laws and the analysis of meaning in spoken discourse.

Semantics and pragmatics also helps to study suicide notes to find out real motives and intention of the person who committed suicide to find out the real cause of his death. It also finds out whether it was a true suicide case, provoked suicide case or a homicide case given a form of suicide. This analysis also takes help from psychology field, because when a person decides to commit suicide he must be in a very critical psychological condition and forensic linguistics aims to find out the reason of that condition which resulted to his death.

Following are some characteristics of a suicide note, not necessarily present in each case are given,

A suicide note may have irregular handwriting, bad handwriting, irregularities in alignments, pen movement, rhythm, speed, differences in size of letters, more and more negative words, reason of his suicide, or sometimes names of the person provoked him to commit suicide.

Case Study:

Staffordshire Case

A house had burnt down and there was a husband Christopher Birks and wife Amanda Birks and two children. The husband managed to rescue his two children, but his wife had apparently trapped in the house fire. The police had their suspicions about the death of the Amanda Birks as the toxicological analysis showed that she was not alive when the fire was started but detectives have not been able to establish how she died.

Here investigators took the help of Forensic Linguists to solve the case.

What Forensic Linguistics established is that text messages had continued to be sent from the wife's phone that entire day, long after they thought she'd actually died. They analyzed the historical texting style of the victim Amanda Birks and of her husband Christopher Birks, and then compared these texting styles with those messages sent on the day of the fire from the victim‟s phone. These texts actually more consistent with the writing style of the husband. This leads to create suspicion on the husband who interrogated and admitted of actually having murdered his wife and set the fire to hide his crime. Then He sent those messages from his wife‟s phone after her death to cause misinterpretation of the actual timing of her death and misleading the case.

All these uses of linguistics analysis in both civil and criminal cases fixed the root of Forensic Linguistics permanently in Forensic science and make it an important part of Crime Investigation.

REFERENCES:

1. Coulthard, M., & Johnson, A. (2007). An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. The International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law, London and New York: Taylor and Francis Group.

2. MacMenamin, G. R. (2002). Forensic Linguistics: Advances in Forensic Stylistics. Florida, USA: CRS Press.

3. Cotterill, J. (2003). Language in the Legal Process. New York NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

4. Indian Penal Code 1860 s. 415, 417 (Ind.)

5. Christensson, P. (2011, September 5). Plagiarism Definition. Retrieved 2018, Jan 9, from https://techterms.com

6. Wardrop M. (2009, December 12). Businessman who murdered wife and set fire to home is jailed for life. Retrieved 2018, Jan 9, from http://www.telegraph.co.uk