Come alone!! There was one who matched that description perfectly, and when confronted he confessed. Leonard, siding with Apple, contends that it is a proper noun, which is to say a trademarked expression that should be capitalized. Butters is a past president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists, which has some two hundred and fifty members.
Today, one can study forensic linguistics at several schools, and last year Leonard inaugurated the first graduate program in forensic linguistics, at Hofstra. Immigration and Customs Enforcement hires language detectives to assist agents in evaluating asylum seekers.
In such cases, forensic linguists interview applicants to verify that their accents and their use of idiom and slang match those of the country they claim to have fled.
This trend has widened an old schism in the field. Given the stakes in, say, the Coleman case—a felony murder potentially involving the death sentence—some linguists hold the view that Leonard is taking forensic linguists into groundbreaking territory. He was noticeably kempt, in pressed slacks and a crisp blue button-down shirt—a Sam Spade of semantics. His hair was surprisingly dark for a man in his sixties; his eyes were playful and his smile fetching, a little bit show biz. Long before he emerged as one of the foremost language detectives in the country, Leonard had achieved a different kind of celebrity.
By , Leonard the heartthrob had to choose between academia and show business. Leonard pursued a scholarly career until , when he heard Shuy give a lecture urging linguists to apply their training in the real world—especially in the courtroom, as language detectives.
Leonard struck up a professional friendship with Shuy and has been consulting on cases ever since. As we sat in his office, Leonard described his recent involvement in the tabloid saga of Natalee Holloway. In , after graduating from high school in Alabama, Holloway went with her friends on a chaperoned trip to Aruba and disappeared.
The case remains unsolved. The chief suspect is a young Dutchman named Joran van der Sloot, who pleaded guilty in to charges of murdering a twenty-one-year-old woman in Peru. In Aruba, two young brothers, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, were initially arrested they and van der Sloot had partied with Holloway the night before she disappeared , but were released in the first weeks of the investigation.
The Kalpoe legal team has hired Leonard as their expert witness in a lawsuit that could turn on the pronunciation of a single syllable. Leonard examined the uncut version of the exchange. In it, Kalpoe denies having sex with Holloway. During the covert interview, the microphone generated a great deal of confusing ambient sound. Amid the muffled noises, and before Kalpoe speaks, there is an odd sound— sha! An expert hired by the opposing counsel was taking the position that the sha!
The program, though, aired only a still photo of Deepak. It may be that the changes made to the edited interview were deliberately damaging, but forensic linguists offer another possibility: that a subtle presumption of guilt unconsciously overwhelmed the editing process and inverted the meaning of the exchange. Such inversions, linguists say, happen far more often than we might like to believe. According to Leonard, words serve as catalysts, setting off sparks of potential meaning that the listener organizes into more specific meaning by observing facial expressions, body language, and other redundant cues.
One afternoon at Hofstra, Leonard explained to the twenty students in his introductory course how this works. John is a student, one called out; he is either on a bus or walking. And how is John getting to school? Meaning, Leonard noted, is constantly bent by expectation, and can be grossly distorted.
Abscam was an F. At one point, though, the agent playing the sheikh would offer the congressmen an outright bribe. Their conversations were videotaped, and some of the evidence was breathtakingly unambiguous.
The sting resulted in seven indictments. The press release from the New Yorker announcing the piece is below. At the bottom is a link to the article itself, which is behind a paywall.
Stevens was serving his sixth full term in Alaska when, in , he was indicted on charges of failing to report gifts.
Superiors in the Justice Department decided to bring in a whole new team to try to salvage the conviction. After four years of work, Marsh had been thrown off the case of his life. While Schuelke was conducting his inquiry, Stevens died in a plane crash, and one of the prosecutors committed suicide.
I wrote about the Stevens prosecution saga here. In other words, Sullivan has appointed Gleeson to much the same role as he had named Schuelke, a decade earlier. Of course, there is a major difference between the Stevens and Flynn cases. Stevens was about an excess of prosecutorial zeal, while Flynn is about insufficient effort by the Justice Department: cheating to win versus cheating to lose. The big question for Gleeson, then, is how he will want to proceed with his investigation.
Sullivan could also seek to charge Flynn with contempt for lying in his courtroom about his interactions with the F. Alternatively, Gleeson could ask to proceed much as Schuelke did, and ask Sullivan for permission to examine witnesses to determine why the Justice Department reversed course. Schuelke took two years and produced a five-hundred-page report about the misconduct in the Stevens case.
Either way, it looks as if Gleeson will move with considerably more dispatch than Schuelke did.
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