Gail Stygall

A Different Class of Witnesses: Experts in the Courtroom

This investigation examines the discursive history and contemporary courtroom discourse of expert witnesses in Anglo-American courts, incorporating the methods of Michel Foucault into a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework. The history of experts is marked by a profound discontinuity in the role of experts, during the late medieval period, with experts relegated to a witness role instead of a juror role - that of the privately knowledgeable investigator - they previously held. Examination of the discourse of contemporary experts in three high-profile US trials documents a different witness status for experts along three parameters: amplification of question responses; the use of the contrastive discourse marker well to express professional disagreement with their interlocutors; and the embedding of professional practices into so clauses. These parameters stand in sharp contrast to ordinary witness discourse. The study concludes with a discussion of the stakes in legal control of expert witnesses including asymmetrical access to experts by economic status, the possible suppression of some expert testimony by recent US Supreme Court decisions, and the hierarchicalization of expert knowledge.

“Did They Really Say That?” The Women of Wenatchee: Vulnerability, Confessions, and Linguistic Analysis

This article analyzes the vulnerabilities of certain women in custodial interrogations in the United States through legal, linguistic, and discourse analysis. At special risk are the impoverished or working class, the ill educated or illiterate, those with disabilities, or those who are nonnative speakers of English. Placing custodial interrogation into its U.S. legal setting, the study examines linguistic and discourse aspects of Miranda-related decisions and confessions. Drawing on data from the 1990s “Wenatchee Sex Ring” investigation and trials, the study examines the language of four women arrested and prosecuted in the Wenatchee cases. The analysis addresses discourse-level aspects of the data, including topic management and threats during the interrogation; the production of narratives as well as statements of location, result, and duration; and the sexual language used in the confessions. The article concludes that discourse analysis may provide an additional check on rogue interrogations of vulnerable people and once again calls for consistent recording of custodial interrogations in the United States.

Textual Barriers to United States Immigration

The ideological project of keeping the USA free from illegal aliens is often captured in images of an actual physical border to be defended, asserting bounded, nationalist space. We see and read news accounts of the border patrol holding back the ‘flood’ of illegal immigrants from Latin America. Accounts of these Latin Americans trying to reach the USA — sometimes dying of heat or cold in the desert-like land of the south-western states or chased out by vigilante ranchers protecting their property — appear frequently in US newspapers and news magazines. If they are still alive when found, they are ‘processed’ back out of the country. Alternatively on both coasts, media reports warn of the dangers of attempting to enter the USA without formal application, when yet another container ship from East Asia filled with weakened, dying or dead bodies of illegal immigrants is discovered. They, too, are processed out as soon as they are physically able. The Coast Guard patrols the waters off the coast of Florida, too, keeping Haitians at bay. The Immigration and Naturalization Service maintains these images in their own in-house publication, occasionally publishing graphs and pie charts extolling their abilities to meet the quotas on ‘alien removal’ for the year.