Analysis Of Jack Hitt's Words On Trial

In “Words on Trial,” Jack Hitt’s main argument addresses the following question: can linguists solve crimes that the police, or the court cannot. Moreover, this essay focuses on cases where the evidence presented was not examined correctly and have led to, in some cases, drastically disparate results compared to what the police presented as evidence. The essay starts off with an exhibit source, which is broken down throughout. Although “forensics” (forensic scientists) were not able to link any DNA to the crime (the murder of his wife and kids), experts were able to link him to a few circumstances of the case. Hitt agrees with this when he says, “At the trial, experts could show that some of the threatening e-mails had been sent from Coleman’s

However, no conclusive results could be found, which led to the use of a testimony from the forensic linguist, Robert Leonard. Throughout his testimony, he notes the similarities between the writing style of both the suspect, Coleman, and the unknown individual who committed the crime (e.g., both start most sentences with the f-word and misuse apostrophes), which led the jury to find him guilty. This is an example of how, unlike the police, forensic linguistics can be successful and useful in proving crimes. They then transition the focus to explaining how individuals - jurists, police, judges, anyone - tend to dismiss the little misunderstandings and errors within evidence, that these linguists have just started working on to fix. Unlike the previous articles that I dissected, this article has a focus on the tampering of evidence. Hitt includes the discussion of Roger Shuy, the father of forensic linguistics, who discussed how evidence in the courtroom has been known to be misused through the “distorted… process of writing or recording” evidence/testimonies. An example of this would be the police transcript described in the

A quick look at the tape showed a complete different version of what they said. Was it intentional? Maybe not. Other factors that tend to effect the evidence include “confusing ambient sound[s]” and the way the evidence is recorded (e.g., do you see the face of the suspect as he/she speaks; does the individual examining the tape see his/her vocalization of the text) (“Words”). Overall, this article has a slightly different focus: one that explains how evidence can be tampered, how forensic linguists can stop the abuse of evidence, while furthering the idea of how powerful this field can