ABSTRACT
The vast majority of witnesses who give evidence in court have some personal involvement in the case and are there to recount relevant facts and experiences. However, there is a second category of witness, the expert witness, who has no personal involvement and who is there to help the court by giving their opinion, based on professional expertise, about some aspect(s) of the forensic evidence – be it the time and manner of death, footprints, DNA traces, recorded conversations or text messages. Few experts are engaged full time with court work. They are professionals across a wide range of disciplines – archaeologists, doctors, dentists, engineers, research scientists and of course linguists and phoneticians. I know of only one forensic linguist and a very small number of forensic phoneticians who work full-time on casework. The majority of expert linguists are academics who do occasional casework and rarely go to court: most of them average fewer than ten cases a year and one court appearance every two years. For this reason, giving evidence in person in court can be a stressful experience. As Shuy observes: For those who have never experienced cross-examination, there is no way to emphasise how emotionally draining it can be. … Testifying is not for the weak at heart’ (Shuy 2002: 3-4). Nor indeed for the weak at stomach – one of my former colleagues eventually gave
up acting as an expert document analyst after some 25 years, because he could no longer cope with the vomiting which preceded most of his appearances in the witness box. Giving evidence can also be profoundly frustrating for the academic expert. As Maley
observes, in an excellent paper examining linguistic aspects of expert testimony,
expert witnesses, particularly if they are new and inexperienced, tend to be quite unaware of the extent to which shaping and construction of evidence goes on. … All too often they emerge frustrated from the courtroom, believing that they have not been able to give their evidence in the way they would like and that their evidence has been twisted and/or disbelieved.
