Lend me your ears Robson, Jeremy
The international journal of evidence & proof,
07/2018, Letnik:
22, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reviews the approaches taken by the courts to the admissibility of voice identification evidence in four jurisdictions: England and Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Republic of ...Ireland. Each jurisdiction addresses the question in a different way and each approach is open to criticism. This paper will argue that a contextualised approach to the problem would allow for improvements which would enhance the quality of the evidence and the adjudicative process.
This paper is a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the use of the word respect by the main advocates in the High Court and Supreme Court hearings of R v Secretary of State for Exiting the European ...Union (the ‘Brexit case’). Courtroom discourse has received substantial research attention in pragmatics, and previous work has largely focused on notions of face and im/politeness exhibited in power-asymmetric encounters between lawyers and witnesses in hostile cross-examination. In contrast, this paper focuses on lawyer–judge interaction in appellate hearings and explores the ways in which advocates negotiate the task of making face-threats that are inherent to the discourse situation, while maintaining the levels of professional courtesy demanded by the institution. The word respect has a particular role in managing this balance, and has attached to it well-established implicit, indexical and professional meanings within the legal profession. The corpus analysis here shows that, although the advocates in question use respect in seemingly formulaic and ritualised ways, it is used to achieve multiple facework and interactional goals. Throughout the analysis we see advocates use respect when (dis)agreeing with judges, challenging opposing counsel and making recommendations to the court.
•‘Respect’ has implicit, indexical and institutional meaning in the courtroom.•Lawyers in appeal hearings must balance disagreement with courtesy.•Lawyers use ‘respect’ routinely as a marker of professional identity.•‘Respect’ is versatile and is used to achieve a wide range of goals.•The pragmatics of the appeal court is distinct from that of other courtroom contexts.
In this work I examine the approach of the courts to cases which depart from expected and anticipated norms. Using four case studies from areas where courts have had to respond to situations with ...which it may be unfamiliar, I explain how, if not properly guided, the courts risk relying on assumptions and beliefs which potentially jeopardise the rationality of the decision which is made. This question is considered in the particular contexts of (i) women who wear the Niqab in court; (ii) voice identification evidence; (iii) the offence of coercive control; and (iv) male victims of sexual assault. In my work, I illustrate how the unfamiliarity of decision-makers with each of these topics, when combined with the sociological and psychological factors which arise in these cases, creates the risk that decisions are being made which are not 'rational'. In part, this is due to the structuralist nature of decision-making, or 'bricolage.' In my expository statement I will explain how a bricolage methodology enables analysis of this question. The four areas I have discussed are exemplars of four discrete areas which are outside the normal experience of decision-makers in criminal trials and serve as exemplars of how a bricolage approach is used to solve such problems and the shortcomings of this approach.
Use of Received Pronunciation (RP) is a proxy for particular kinds of elite social capital, but it is also a professional norm and part of the Bourdieusian habitus of the Bar. This article uses the ...first empirical study of accent discrimination in relation to barristers in England and Wales as a basis for a theoretical consideration of the interaction between barristers and others: clients, jurors, judges and other barristers. In particular it evaluates ways in which understandings about accent, as a facet of social or cultural capital, impact on individual career decisions. It concludes that while considerable progress has been made on diversity of the profession, targeted action by the regulator and the profession is required to address perceptions of discrimination (and manifestations of discrimination itself) in a profession to whose activities speech is foundational.
Historically, there has been less research carried out on earwitness than eyewitness testimony. However, in some cases, earwitness evidence might play an important role in securing a conviction. This ...paper focuses on accent which is a central characteristic of voices in a forensic linguistic context. The paper focuses on two experiments (Experiment 1,
= 41; Experiment 2,
= 57) carried out with participants from a wide range of various locations around the United Kingdom to rate the accuracy and confidence in recognizing accents from voices from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland as well as looking at specificity of answers given and how this varies for these regions. Our findings show that accuracy is variable and that participants are more likely to be accurate when using vaguer descriptions (such as "Scottish") than being more specific. Furthermore, although participants lack the meta-linguistic ability to describe the features of accents, they are able to name particular words and pronunciations which helped them make their decision.
Is he a barrister or not? Braber, Natalie; Ching, Jane; Jarman, Jane ...
The international journal of speech, language and the law,
02/2024
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Barristers present formalised legal arguments before courts and tribunals. As a result, considerable focus is placed on their oral skills. However, people are frequently judged by the accent they ...use. Those with a more standard accent – ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP) in the UK – can be perceived as more intelligent and eloquent. This creates a barrier to social mobility because accent-based bias can discriminate against those with non-standard accents. This article examines how the public perceives barristers in England and Wales with different accents and investigates experiences of barristers to establish whether accent discrimination disadvantages certain speakers. It includes an online survey of the general public which found that RP and South-East English accents are still seen as more prestigious. In addition, interviews with barristers illustrate how accent discrimination is widespread and affects career progression.
Abstract
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease. Delayed administration of PD medications is associated with increased risk of life-threatening complications including ...choking, aspiration pneumonia and neuroleptic malignant syndrome.
In 2016, the spouse of a patient with PD wrote to Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust (LTHT) to highlight that multiple medication delays and omissions had occurred during his recent admission. In response, LTHT formed a PD quality improvement (QI) Collaborative of multidisciplinary members committed to ensuring timely PD medication administration.
The faculty used Institute for Healthcare Improvement Model for Improvement QI methodology. Interventions were tested on pilot wards and the most successful were scaled up and spread across all 90 adult inpatient wards as an ‘intervention bundle’.
Between January 2016 and June 2020 mean delays in the time from admission to first dose of medication dropped from over 7 to under 1 h. The mean percentage of omitted PD medications reduced from 15.1 to 0.6%.
Project success was multifactorial but due to:
Simplicity of interventions.Multiprofessional ownership by frontline teams to make changes and take prompt action.The spouse of the patient taking a leading role in the Collaborative, bringing her unique personal insight and experience, which facilitated behavioural change.
Discussion around sexual offending traditionally focuses on the notion of male offenders and female victims. In this article, we argue that there is clear evidence that females commit offences and ...that males are often the victims of these offences. We discuss the evidence for this and the impact it has on the victims of these offences. We argue that the processes which have informed policy in this area have dismissed this class of offending and as a result the Sexual Offences Act and associated policies do not provide a clear enough framework for the prosecution of these offenders. We present some suggestions for how this lacuna could be addressed.
Voice identification parades can be unreliable, as earwitness responses are error-prone. In this paper we tested performance across serial and sequential procedures, and varied pre-parade ...instructions, with the aim of reducing errors. The participants heard a target voice and later attempted to identify it from a parade. In Experiment 1 they were either warned that the target may or may not be present (standard warning) or encouraged to consider responding "not present" because of the associated risk of a wrongful conviction (strong warning). Strong warnings prompted a conservative criterion shift, with participants less likely to make a positive identification regardless of whether the target was present. In contrast to previous findings, we found no statistically reliable difference in accuracy between serial and sequential parades. Experiment 2 ruled out a potential confound in Experiment 1. Taken together, our results suggest that adapting pre-parade instructions provides a simple way of reducing the risk of false identifications.
Unfamiliar voice identification is error-prone. Whilst the investigation of system variables may indicate ways of boosting earwitness performance, this is an under-researched area. Two experiments ...were conducted to investigate how methods of presenting voices during a parade affect accuracy and self-rated confidence. In each experiment participants listened to a target voice, and were later asked to identify that voice from a nine-person target present or target absent parade. In Experiment 1, accuracy did not vary across parades comprising 15 or 30 s sample durations. Overall, when the target was present, participants correctly identified the target voice with 39% accuracy. However, when the target was absent, participants correctly rejected the parade 6% of the time. There was no relationship between accuracy and confidence. In Experiment 2, performance with a serial procedure, in which participants responded after hearing all nine voices, was compared with a sequential procedure, in which participants made a decision after listening to each voice. Overall accuracy was higher with the sequential procedure. These results highlight the importance of system variable research in voice identification. Different methods of presenting voices have the potential to support higher levels of accuracy than the procedure currently recommended in England and Wales.
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