CIDRAL Public Lecture: Tammy A. Gales (Hofstra): Netflix and Change?: Forensic Linguistics and False Confessions in the Age of “True Crime”
| Dates: | 6 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's Work, Leisure, Culture strand.
Tammy A. Gales (Hofstra University) will deliver a public lecture entitled 'Netflix and Change?: Forensic Linguistics and False Confessions in the Age of “True Crime”.
This talk will highlight the cultural role played by popular television shows that have affected the applied academic work we do as forensic linguists. In this talk, I will first introduce the “CSI Effect” (i.e., the knowledge “learned” by the lay public about forensic science methods and data through popular television programs such as “CSI” and “Law and Order”) and then outline how this effect has influenced juries’ expectations of and conclusions about evidence in criminal cases (Thomas 2006; Huey, 2010). Second, we will explore the actual scientific linguistic concepts used by forensic linguists (e.g., sociolinguistic variation (e.g., Schilling, 2006) and register variation (e.g., Biber et al., 1999)), especially as they relate to the social justice issue of false confessions. We will then examine the linguistic evidence in a recent false confession case that we analyzed as part of the Hofstra University Capital Case Innocence Project, wherein the claim was that the suspect’s disputed confession statement had been memorialized in writing by the interrogator as his “verbatim” language. Finally, we will briefly revisit the notion of the “CSI Effect” in light of some of the new “true crime” series produced, in much part by Netflix, that may be starting to educate the general public about the pervasive problem of false confessions within our criminal justice systems.
Tammy Gales is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Linguistics, Threat Assessment, and Strategic Analysis at Hofstra University, New York. Her primary research uses corpus and discourse analytic methods to examine authorial stance in threatening communications and other forensic contexts. She has trained law enforcement agents from agencies across Canada and the U.S. and applied her work to criminal and civil cases for both prosecution and defense.
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SG.16
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
