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The Routledge Companion to the Work of John R. Rickford

Renée Blake, Isabelle Buchstaller

Linguistics on Trial, Under Arrest, and in Prison

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Natalie Schilling
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27
LINGUISTICS ON TRIAL, UNDER
ARREST, AND IN PRISON
On Sharing Sociolinguistic and Forensic Linguistic
Knowledge With Attorneys, Law Enforcement
Practitioners, and Incarcerated Persons
Natalie Schilling

Introduction
Heeding the calls of Labov, Rickford, Wolfram, Baugh, and others, sociolinguists have worked for
the past 50-plus years to educate an array of audiences on the linguistic and cultural value of dialects
deemed ‘nonstandard’ by ‘mainstream’ institutions. Many of these efforts have been centered on the
educational arena, and sociolinguists have worked with schoolteachers, parents and children to help
ameliorate dialect-based discrimination in the classroom, as well as potential educational difficulties
grounded in dialect differences—and teachers’ often negative attitude toward these differences. For
example, Simpkins and Simpkins (1981), Rickford and Rickford (1995b), and Labov (2001a) created
dialect readers and other materials to help students who come to the classroom speaking vernacular
dialects achieve success in reading and writing in standard language varieties. Similarly, Wolfram and
colleagues have created school curricula on dialect variation, as well as informal educational materials
(e.g., museum displays, documentary videos) for parents and other community members (e.g., Wol-
fram 1998; Wolfram et al. 2008). Further, linguists have testified in court and elsewhere in response to
language-based inequities in the educational arena, for example, in the well-known Ann Arbor case
of 1979 (e.g., Smitherman 1981; Labov 1982) and Ebonics controversy of the late 1990s. (See e.g.,
Rickford 1997b for an especially clear and compelling presentation for non-academic audiences on
the linguistic systematicity and cultural value of African American English, hereafter AAE.)
Sociolinguists have also made valuable efforts to educate the public regarding dialect variation in
other arenas, as evidenced for example in Baugh’s work on exposing and helping prevent race-based
housing discrimination grounded in linguistic profiling—that is, the attempted identification of indi-
viduals’ demographic characteristics based on their linguistic characteristics (e.g., Baugh 2003). In
addition, there has been important work by sociolinguists on dialect and language-related issues in
the legal sphere. A key recent example is Rickford and King’s (2016e) analysis and argument decrying
linguistic prejudice following the outcome of the 2013 State of Florida v. George Zimmerman case, in
which the extensive testimony of the key witness for the prosecution, Rachael Jeantel, was disregarded
by the jury in large part due to her use of AAE on the witness stand.
However, as Rickford and King (and Rickford 1997b) make clear, sociolinguistics still have much
to contribute in the legal arena. Miscarriages of justice grounded in linguistic misunderstandings are

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recurrent, and their effects are felt most strongly by speakers of disparaged language varieties (or lan-
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guages) from disparaged social groups. Hence, Rickford and King conclude their 2016 article with a
call to action. They urge linguists to actively seek ways to use their academic expertise to ameliorate
the linguistic misunderstandings that plague justice systems in the United States and throughout the
world, through such means as conducting research on cross-dialectal (mis)perceptions (both linguistic
and social) in the courtroom, accepting invitations to serve as expert witnesses in legal cases, teaching
about the realities of dialect variation to an array of relevant audiences (e.g., attorneys, judges, mem-
bers of the public who may one day serve on juries), and in general pushing for ‘vernacular speakers
to be heard (listened to, valued, given a fair hearing) in the courts and other domains’ (2016e: 981).
In this chapter, I elaborate on Rickford and King’s call to action by discussing a variety of ways in
which linguists can work with a full array of actors in the legal arena, including not only courtroom
participants but also law enforcement officers and incarcerated individuals. I illustrate the value of
such outreach efforts by describing my own work with these groups, which ranges from serving as
expert consultant to criminal and civil lawyers; to designing and presenting training sessions for top
law enforcement agencies such as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Royal Cana-
dian Mounted Police; to bringing together university students and exonerated individuals to examine
the grave issue of false confessions; to teaching a unit on sociolinguistics and forensic linguistics to
incarcerated individuals at Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Maryland
(in the mid-Atlantic United States); to offering linguistic assistance in an ongoing effort to exonerate
a current incarceree.
My efforts demonstrate that these audiences can benefit from accurate knowledge about the role
language plays in legal matters, and indeed that they are thirsty for such knowledge. For example,
attorneys can learn from linguists that expert knowledge of dialect variation is important, often
imperative, for accurate identification of speaker demographics or individual speakers based on ver-
bal characteristics, and that non-expert identification of voices (so-called earwitness identification)
is typically far from accurate. In addition, law enforcement officers can learn from linguists about
regular correlations between dialect and demographics, as well as complications stemming from sty-
listic variation and identity presentations involving intricate ‘repertoires’ rather than neatly bounded
‘dialects’ (e.g., Benor 2010). Further, researchers who have conducted studies of possible linguistic
indicators of veracity and deception in language, as well as discourse analysis of interrogation events,
can provide evidence of false and/or coerced confessions.
At the same time, linguists have much to learn from actors in the legal arena. For example, we
can learn through our work with attorneys to craft linguistic explanations that are at the same time
scientifically rigorous yet clear to non-experts, as well as confined to the linguistic facts, since expert
witnesses are not, and should not be, the triers of fact. We can also learn from law enforcement officers
to work with ‘real-life’ evidence that is often sparse and noisy in comparison with experimental or
interview data; and we can learn from police officers about the linguistic challenges that both they
and civilians face when the two groups interact in situations where communicative missteps can cause
escalation of intergroup tensions. Finally, we can learn from exonerees and incarcerated persons, on a
personal, emotional level, how large a role linguistic misunderstandings actually play in miscarriages
of justice and hence how pressing the need truly is for linguists to heed Rickford and King’s call for
sociolinguists’ more active involvement in the legal arena.

Outreach to Attorneys and Other Courtroom Actors

Since the pioneering work of Roger Shuy in working to educate attorneys, juries and judges in mat-
ters such as the social patterning of language variation and the structure and interpretation of dis-
course conventions, linguists increasingly have been involved in applying their linguistic knowledge
to legal issues (see Shuy 2007 for an overview). In fact, forensic linguistics has now emerged as a field

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of study in its own right, with thriving research and instructional programs in the United Kingdom,
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Australia, Spain, Germany, and the United States. One notable case in which linguists have worked to
educate attorneys and courtroom participants is the Pan Am bomb threat case of the mid-1980s, in
which Labov gave courtroom testimony on regional dialect variation in the United States that proved
to be crucial in exculpating the wrongly imprisoned suspect (e.g., Labov 1988). Another is the FBI’s
‘Abscam’ investigation of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which Shuy provided expertise grounded
in discourse analysis and Speech Act Theory, demonstrating that the United States Senator at the
center of the case was not conclusively guilty of accepting a bribe (e.g., Shuy 1996). As another out-
standing example, there is Diana Eades’ long and continuing record of educating attorneys, jurors, and
judges on cross-cultural (mis)communications between people of Australian Aboriginal and English
backgrounds (e.g., 1992, 2012, 2015), including White speakers’ misinterpretation (both unconscious
and willful) of Aboriginal discourse conventions such as ‘gratuitous concurrence’—that is, frequent
use of ‘yeh’ as a backchannel rather than an indicator of agreement.
For my part, I have been involved in forensic linguistic casework for the past 10 years, on matters
ranging from authorship attribution to speaker identification, to author and speaker profiling (e.g.,
Schilling and Marsters 2015). One case in which I was involved stands out in its connection to Rick-
ford and King (2016e), in that it involves failure to accurately hear or give a fair hearing to a person
of color who speaks a vernacular dialect. In this case, though, the issue is not with a witness to whom
jurors refuse to grant credibility, but rather a suspect who jurors refuse to believe. This is the case of
The People v. Eric Frimpong (2010). Frimpong is from Ghana and was recruited by the University of
California-Santa Barbara (UCSB) to play soccer. He led the team to its first-ever national champion-
ship. His career was cut short when he was accused of rape in 2007. He was found guilty and sen-
tenced to six years in prison. Two requests for appeals were denied, and he served out his full prison
term. He was released in 2013 and deported to Ghana.
As part of the investigation in this case, the alleged victim was asked to participate in a speaker
identification procedure, or earwitness identification task. Research shows that speaker recognition,
or the identification of a single individual based on speech alone, is more difficult than it may seem
to be, even for trained linguists. For nonlinguists, or so-called naïve listeners, the task is even harder.
Nonetheless, earwitness identification is not infrequently used in police investigations and at trial.
Just as with eyewitness identification, earwitness identification ideally involves a ‘properly constituted’
line-up, in this case a line-up of voices rather than of suspects or their photos. Such a line-up will
consist of more than two voices, matched as closely as possible for factors such as age, sex, ethnicity,
dialect, average pitch, and pitch range; and participants will all read the same ‘innocuous’ text, devoid
of reference to criminal matters (e.g., Nolan 2003). In US courts, a properly constituted voice line-up
is considered to be ‘non-suggestive,’ while other procedures may be deemed ‘suggestive,’ for example,
if only one voice is played or if the witness is asked to confront a suspect or suspects in person, rather
than listening to previous made audio recordings. Suggestive voice identification procedures may
still be considered by the courts to be ‘reliable,’ based on the ‘totality of the circumstances.’ The latter
includes such factors as degree of familiarity of the witness with the voice of the alleged perpetrator,
amount of exposure to the voice of the alleged perpetrator both during the commission of the crime
and during the voice identification procedure, amount of time between the original exposure and the
identification task, familiarity with the language or dialect in question, and degree of witness attention
to the voice during the crime, all of which have been proven by researchers to affect speaker iden-
tification ability (Neil v. Biggers 1972; Manson v. Brathwaite 1977; Solan and Tiersma 2005: 117–148).
The attorneys seeking to appeal the ruling in the Frimpong case were not linguists, but they sus-
pected that something was wrong with the voice identification task. In 2010, they contacted me and
asked me to prepare a written expert opinion on the suggestiveness and reliability of the procedure.
The details of the voice identification task in the Frimpong case are as follows: The alleged crime
took place between 12:15 and 1:15 in the morning. Approximately seven or eight hours later, the

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sheriff ’s detectives arrived at the home of the alleged victim to interview her about the crime. As
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part of the interview, one of the detectives asked her to listen to what he later characterized on the
witness stand as a ‘five second clip’ from Frimpong’s interview with the police from several hours
before. There were no other voice excerpts. (In fact, no other suspects had been sought.) The alleged
victim identified the voice as that of Frimpong and also stated that her attacker had an ‘island’ accent.
Clearly, though, this voice identification procedure was highly suggestive—there was only one voice,
that of the suspect; it was extremely short; and it was non-neutral in content, since the interview was
of course about the alleged crime.
In terms of reliability, we must turn to the totality of the circumstances. In this case, the witness’s level
of attention during the commission of the alleged crime was very low, since she was very drunk (with
a blood alcohol level of around .26 at the time of the crime and still at .20 at the time of identification
procedure). Her level of familiarity with the voice of the suspect and that of the alleged perpetrator were
also both low: she stated that she had just met Frimpong on the night of the alleged rape and that the
alleged attacker said very little to her during the crime (and nor could she remember what he had said,
due to her drunkenness). Further, there is the matter of accent. As linguists know, non-experts are not
very good at identifying unfamiliar accents, and Frimpong by no means had an island or ‘Caribbean’
accent, since he was from Ghana, nearly 7,800 kilometers from the Caribbean. These factors all add up
to unreliability.
In sum, then, in my Declaration for the attorneys seeking an appeal, I gave the opinion that the
voice identification procedure was extremely suggestive, prejudicial, and unreliable, based on the ear-
witness identification task itself and on the totality of the circumstances. Unfortunately, the appeal
was not successful, but efforts to clear Frimpong’s name continue to this day, with my Declaration
serving a part of the evidence that Frimpong was never granted a fair hearing. In addition, through
my work on this case, I was able to educate the defense attorneys regarding speaker identification and
factors that impact upon its accuracy, so that perhaps in future cases, attorneys and other legal actors
will speak out earlier and more forcibly against violations of suspects’ rights to due process based on
ill-designed and executed earwitness identification tasks.
My involvement in the Frimpong matter was also a learning experience for me. When I was
first approached about the case, I hesitated, since sexual assaults and rape are grave problems on
United States university campuses, and I had no idea whether or not Frimpong was actually
guilty. However, I quickly realized that my job was to provide linguistic expertise—not serve as
a trier of fact. And clearly in this case linguistic expertise indicates that the voice identification
procedure, whose results were admitted into evidence, was deeply flawed. Hence, Frimpong’s
right to due process was violated, regardless of his guilt or innocence, and I as a linguist had a
duty to make this known.

Working With Law Enforcement

In addition to working to educate attorneys, judges and juries, linguists also need to reach out to law
enforcement professionals to share their linguistic, sociolinguistic and forensic linguistic understand-
ings with them. Through offering training sessions, linguists can help law enforcement officers to
build a knowledge base of accurate understandings on matters such as speaker and author identifi-
cation and profiling, the discourse of language crimes, and the language of police-civilian encoun-
ters. One researcher who has engaged in numerous outreach efforts with law enforcement is Roger
Shuy, who has consulted with and provided training session to top agencies such as the FBI and the
United States Drug Enforcement Administration. In addition, Howard Giles’ work is noteworthy,
since his interest in intergroup (mis)communication, including between police and civilians, led him
to become a Reserve Police Officer in addition to his ‘day’ job as a professor, a role in which he served
for 15 years.

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Through his research and his work experiences, Giles has demonstrated that police-civilian encoun-
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ters can go awry (sometimes fatally so) due in large part to spiraling non-accommodative behavior (or
complementary schismogenesis; Bateson 1935) between the two ‘sides’ involved (e.g., Anderson et al.
2002; Giles et al. 2008; Giles 2012, 2017). Citizens may become defensive in the face of a police force
they view as ‘unfair’ or even ‘brutal’ and of individual officers they perceive as ‘rude or arrogant’ (Giles
et al. 2008). At the same time, rather than simply being fully accommodating to civilians, police offi-
cers in potentially dangerous situations must, as Giles puts it, ‘enact a balance of accommodativeness
and non-accommodativeness,’ in order to at once ‘represent authority and induce compliance, and, at
the same time, show concern, and gain respect and trust’ (Giles 2012).
According to Giles and his fellow researchers, law enforcement practitioners are well aware of
the centrality of effective communicative practices to their job, and they are more open than many
scholars might think toward training programs by researchers in communications, linguistics, and
related fields. They state: ‘While some of us occasionally encounter prejudice toward the academy
from certain law enforcement personnel (as we sometimes do from some other sectors of society),
it is important not to overlook many law enforcement agencies’ desire to learn from us and their
equally strong desire to improve communication effectiveness in every aspect of their profession’
(Anderson et al. 2002: 27–28). At the same time, Giles asserts that civilians too need training, so that
they can gain an understanding of the ‘communicative demands and dilemmas placed on officers’
(e.g., Giles 2012).
In terms of my role, I have been involved in providing training sessions to law enforcement prac-
titioners for almost 15 years. Most of these have been co-designed and presented with James R.
Fitzgerald, a retired FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) with a master’s degree in linguistics from
Georgetown. We have taught units on linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as more specialized
courses in forensic linguistics. We have often worked with national-level organizations such as the FBI
(ongoing since 2004), but we have also presented for specialized groups such as the National Black
Police Association.
From my perspective as an expert in dialect variation, I have often presented on author and speaker
profiling, that is, examining characteristics of anonymous documents or unknown voices to help
determine characteristics of the author or speaker, for example, regional background, gender, ethnicity,
educational level, age, and so on. I start by building from a base in which it is understood that all dia-
lects are equally linguistically valid and culturally valuable and that they often have regular associations
with particular speaker groups. I then complicate things by demonstrating, through examples from
casework and sociolinguistic studies, that sometimes our beliefs about who uses language in what ways
might lead us to draw erroneous profiles. For example, not all African Americans use vernacular AAE,
especially across a spectrum of speech situations. Conversely, an anonymous speaker (e.g., a threat-
ening caller) might ‘sound Black’ but actually be a White person who is ‘crossing’ into AAE (e.g.,
Bucholtz 1999; Cutler 1999), or perhaps imitating AAE for purposes of disguise. Equally untenable
is straightforward gender (i.e., sex) profiling based on linguistic usages, as evidenced in ample socio-
linguistic research demonstrating that despite some general inter-sex language difference for some
populations in some situations, many factors are implicated in how women and men use language,
including community- and situation-specific matters such as one’s niche in the local economy, one’s
relative power in a given interactional situation, and one’s sense(s) of personal and gender identity, as
well as sexuality and sexual identity (e.g., Schilling 2011; Queen 2013). Further, the training sessions
I offer to law enforcement include discussion of linguistic clues indicative of deception vs. veracity
in witness/suspect statements and other communications. Again, though, I am careful to note that
correlations are complicated, since linguistic strategies for lying can vary based on personal, situational
and cultural factors (e.g., Laing 2015).
One type of communication in which determination of veracity is especially important is the
confession statement. Such determination can include linguistic analysis of statements themselves, as

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well as discourse analysis of interviews in which confessions are obtained for evidence of coercion
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and contamination of witness statements by police who feed details to suspects or otherwise ‘script’
interrogations (e.g., Shuy 2005).

Insights From Exonerated and Incarcerated Individuals

Contrary to popular belief, it is not at all uncommon for people to confess to crimes they did not
commit. According to the Innocence Project, an organization founded in 1992 ‘to free the staggering
number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system responsible
for their unjust imprisonment,’ of the 350-plus convicted individuals in the United States who have
been exonerated by DNA testing, more than one in four made a false confession or incriminating
statement (www.innocenceproject.org/, last accessed June 2018). The reasons for such high numbers
are multifaceted. Among them are manipulative interview tactics by law enforcement personnel, and
youth and inexperience with the criminal justice system. While not all or even most law enforce-
ment professionals or agencies practice coercive interview strategies, some rely on techniques designed
explicitly for the purpose of eliciting confessions, and not necessarily the truth. These practices are
based on the so-called Reid Technique (Inbau et al. [1962] 2015), a method developed in the early
1960s that involves such dubious tactics as confronting suspects with persistent assertions of guilt,
interrupting efforts at denial or defense, making offers and threats that cannot really be fulfilled (e.g.,
offers of lighter sentences, threats of getting the death penalty), and lying to witnesses about evidence.
Sometimes, innocent suspects will confess simply to bring an end to a protracted and highly uncom-
fortable interview session; at other times, they may internalize police officers’ assertions and come to
believe that they actually did commit the crime in question.
The admission of false confessions into evidence in criminal cases is especially troubling because
confessions carry inordinate weight for jurors, judges, and the general public. In order to be admitted,
confessions must be deemed ‘voluntary,’ that is, not due to police coercion. However, what ‘counts’ as
coercion is open to interpretation; in addition, suspects may provide ‘voluntary’ yet invalid confessions
due to mental deficiency, diminished capacity (e.g., youth), and a host of other factors.
As a striking example, consider the case of Marty Tankleff, presented in detail on Tankleff ’s blog
(accessible via www.martytankleff.org, last accessed June 2018). Tankleff ’s parents were brutally
attacked in 1988 when he was 17 years old. His mother was killed in the attack, and his father went
into a coma and died shortly afterward in the hospital. Tankleff placed the initial emergency call and
was immediately flagged by the lead detective on the case as a suspect—in fact, he was the only suspect
initially considered. He was convicted of the crimes in 1990, sentenced to 50 years to life in prison,
and imprisoned. Included in the (very thin) evidence against him was a written confession, partially
completed and not signed. In his 1990 trial, Tankeff denied the veracity of his confession. Under
direct questioning, his attorney asked him to describe his interview with the police, which took place
six hours after he discovered that his parents had been attacked. He stated that the questions were
fast-paced and direct, and that the interrogation included highly suggestive statements such as ‘Well,
you killed your mother first, didn’t you?’ as well as imperatives such as ‘Well, Marty, we don’t want to
hear no. Just say yes.’ Furthermore, the detectives flagrantly lied to Tankleff, telling him during the
interview that his father had briefly come out of his coma to say that Tankleff had been the attacker,
when in fact his father never regained consciousness. Tankleff further asserted that his trust in the
police and in his father led him to internalize the detectives’ claims regarding his father’s words and to
start believing that he must have attacked his parents although he did not remember doing so, perhaps
during a blackout of some sort.
After the trial, while Tankleff remained in jail, his defense team worked to obtain a retrial. Their
repeated efforts were denied until, at long last, a retrial was ordered in 2007. At the conclusion of the

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trial in 2008, all charges against Tankleff were dropped. This may seem like a happy ending, but we
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cannot forget that it did not take place until Tankleff had spent 17 years behind bars.
I had the good fortune to meet Tankleff shortly after his release, at a forensic linguistic work-
shop. A few years later, I came to the realization that not only did I know Tankleff, but I was the
colleague of one of his high school classmates, Marc Howard, Professor in the Georgetown Uni-
versity Department of Government. Howard is a leading advocate for prison reform in the United
States, work which grew out of his long-standing friendship with Tankleff. Both Howard and
Tankleff have been guest speakers in the Forensic Linguistics class I regularly teach at Georgetown,
and through them, students have learned firsthand about the grave problem of false confessions,
and of the use of coercive interview techniques by some misinformed (and sometimes malicious)
police officers and agencies. My students also had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion in
2016 on ‘The Truth About False Confession,’ organized by Howard in his role as director of the
ongoing Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative (https://prisonsandjustice.george-
town.edu/, last accessed June 2018). Among the panelists were Tankleff and three other exonerees,
including Jeffrey Descovic, who had been imprisoned for 16 years after falsely confessing to the
rape and murder of a high school classmate decades ago. Following his release, Descovic went on to
earn his BA and MA degrees and to establish the Jeffrey Descovic Foundation for Justice, another
organization whose mission is to exonerate innocent incarcerated persons (www.thejeffreydeskov-
icfoundationforjustice.org/).
In his panel presentation, Descovic spoke out regarding the dangers of the Reid Technique when
applied to vulnerable suspects. He was adamant in asserting that the technique is designed for hard-
ened criminals, people with long experience with law enforcement who are highly resistant to non-
coercive interview procedures, and that inexperienced and innocent individuals cannot withstand it.
Descovic was also strong in his assertion that forensic linguistics has a role to play in identifying false
confessions. Linguists can be called upon to analyze the discourse of the confession event for evidence
of police coercion, and they can analyze the language of the confession itself for indicators of veracity,
since it is Descovic’s firm belief that, contrary to current standard legal practice, confessions should
be examined not only to ascertain voluntariness, but also validity. Cases like Tankleff ’s and Descovic’s
illustrate that just as linguists can share their expert knowledge with actors in the legal system, so too
can exonerees provide valuable insights based on their own expert knowledge of how language can
be used as a powerful weapon in ‘wars against crime,’ including, far too often, wars against young,
inexperienced, and vulnerable individuals.
One final population with whom linguists can form mutually beneficial relationships is incarcer-
ated persons. In 2016, I was invited to present a guest lecture on forensic linguistics at Jessup Cor-
rectional Institution (JCI). I prepared diligently and included time for an extended discussion of the
notion that all dialects are regularly patterned and culturally important. When I arrived in the class-
room, I began my lecture as planned, but I soon had to regroup, since the students were too quick for
me. I expected objections to the notion of dialect equality, but the students readily concurred with
it, offering examples and performances of notable regional and ethnic dialects, ranging from Boston
English to AAE, the home dialect of most members of the class. The students also agreed with me
that their nonstandard dialects were valuable to them for identity reasons and interactional purposes.
For example, they pointed to how they use highly vernacular, ‘tough’ speech in prison, but different
styles when talking with family members. I was also able to go through the discussion of linguistic
profiling more quickly than I had planned, since the students pointed out that they themselves engage
in such profiling every time they encounter someone new to the prison facility—they size him up,
based in large part on his dialect features. They also noted dialect convergence in moments of inter-
ethnic cooperation and divergence as both a cause of and means for achieving dis-affiliation. Lastly, I
presented on my involvement in the Frimpong voice identification issue, and several students told me

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how validated they felt that there was linguistic science to back up their instinctual feelings that voice
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identifications made in connection with their own trials were also of highly questionable validity and
reliability.
And so, just as I have educated, but also been educated by the attorneys, law enforcement practition-
ers, and exonerees with whom I have shared my knowledge of sociolinguistic and forensic linguistics,
so too have I learned some valuable lessons from the students at JCI. Among these is that although
sociolinguistics who engage in public outreach often encounter resistance from educators and the
(relatively well-educated) ‘general public,’ they might be surprised how much affirmation they will
get from people well versed in the necessity of using and assessing the social meanings of vernacular
language varieties in the course of their daily lives.
The two-way benefit of working with an array of actors in the legal system extends beyond sharing
sociolinguistic knowledge and experiences to mutual validation—of language varieties, of personal
worth, and of the value of our linguistic and social justice pursuits. Decades ago, Labov wrote elo-
quently of meaningful it was to him to use his linguistic expertise to help free the wrongfully impris-
oned suspect in the Pan Am bomb threat case. In his well-known essay ‘How I Got into Linguistics
and What I Got Out of It,’ he wrote:

I have had many scientific results where the convergence of evidence was so strong that I
felt that I had laid my hands on the reality behind the surface, but nothing could be more
satisfactory for any scientific career than to separate fact from fiction in this case. By means
of linguistic evidence, one man could be freed from the corporate enemies who had assailed
him, and another could sleep soundly on the conviction that he had made a just decision
[i.e. to pursue a career in linguistics].
(Labov 2001b: 646)

I too have found similar meaning in my work with attorneys, law enforcement officers, exonerees and
inmates. In fact, my student/colleague Brent Laing and I recently offered our expertise to a team of
students who are currently working with Marc Howard to free an inmate, John Moss III, who was
convicted of triple homicide at age 22 and has been imprisoned for 38 years, in part based on what
linguistic evidence indicates is almost certainly a false confession. The interrogation discourse in
which the confession emerges bears many of the markers of what Shuy (2005) has identified as police
misuse of language to coerce confessions. The audio-recording of the event is periodically stopped,
allowing for non-recorded ‘coaching’ sessions on what the suspect is ‘supposed’ to say; presupposition
is rampant; and details of the crime are often first mentioned by the police, not by the suspect, who
may then repeat the ‘scripted’ information upon being pressed. The incarcerated individual, Mr. Moss,
is not yet free, but we have high hopes that his pleas for freedom will once again be heard, with evi-
dence from linguistic analysis now being included in his bid.
When we first met with the student ‘investigators’ in this case, they immediately told us how pro-
foundly grateful Mr. Moss is for our help. His gratitude, and that of the many others with whom I
have worked on matters pertaining to language and law, in turn makes me grateful, just like Labov, that
I chose a career in linguistics, and that I can use my knowledge to bring people hope, and to further
the cause of justice. I am also immensely grateful to John R. Rickford, for his insights, his good works,
and his calls to action that have inspired so many of us.

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