Forensic Linguistics in Court: The Tennessee Facebook Murders
In a 2012 case known as the Tennessee Facebook Murders, forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University analyzed the online correspondences of “Chris”, an alleged CIA agent encouraging the parents and family friend of Janelle Potter to take out a CIA-sanctioned hit, themselves, on a couple who had unfriended Potter on Facebook.
Authorship analysis demonstrated that Potter herself posed as “Chris” to convince her family and friend that she herself was under threat by the couple, eventually leading her father and the family friend to murder the couple in cold blood, with their infant left in the dead mother’s arms.
Potter, her parents, and the family friend were all convicted of varying counts of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, and solicitation.
Find out more about the Tennessee Facebook Murders in the book “Too Pretty to Live” by Dennis Brooks, and on Investigation Discovery’s special of the same name.
Forensic Linguistics in Court: The Coleman Murders
A St. Louis Post Dispatch article on the 2009 murder of the family of Chris Coleman details the work of forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University.
Dr. Leonard analyzed threat letters sent to Coleman’s family, as well as spray painted words left at the scene of the triple homicide. These writings were compared to Coleman’s, as well as the FBI’s Communicated Threat Assessment Database to demonstrate the Coleman himself was responsible to the threats to his wife and two children before they were murdered.
Based on this and other evidence, Chris Coleman was found guilty of all three murders.
Forensic Linguistics in Literature: The J. K. Rowling Reveal
In this NPR interview, Larkin Page-Jacobs interviews Dr. Patric Juola, a computational forensic linguist from Duquesne University, on his outing J.K. Rowling as the woman behind the pen name Robert Galbraith, the author of ‘A Cuckoo’s Calling’.
Dr. Juola used a computational approach to authorship analysis and attribution when asked by the Sunday Times (UK) to compare four suspected authors to the writings of Robert Galbraith, as detailed in the linked articles.
In the clip from MTV’s Unlocking the Truth, the hosts discuss the veracity of the alleged confession in the Michael Politte case.
The hosts of Unlocking the Truth worked with the Hofstra Forensic Linguistics Capital Case Innocence Project to do a full analysis of all the language evidence in the Byron Case case, including conflicting witness testimony, problems with the police and fire expert’s report, and the alleged confession.
Find out more about the Michael Politte case at the Midwest Innocence Project site, and on MTV’s Unlocking the Truth.
Jim Fitzgerald, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, has worked on many cases that attracted national attention, including the JonBenét Ramsey case and the post 9/11 anthrax scare, as well as the Unabomber case, which he discusses with host Jerri Williams on FBI Retired Case File Review in the audio above.
For more about the Unabomber case and the role of forensic linguistics in catching Ted Kaszynski, check out the article, linked above, that accompanies the interview.
Forensic Linguistics in Court: Danish Syrian Rebel Texts
“Are you coming to Syria, brother?”
“Ask a linguist :-)”
“Lol!”
For the first time in Danish history, a linguist—Professor Tanya Karoli Christiansen of the University of Copenhagen—served as an expert witness, in the case of a suspected Danish citizen traveling to Syria to support domestic terrorism in Denmark.
Find out about Professor Christiansen’s talk next Saturday, 11/12/16, here.
For more information about this case and the introduction and evolution of forensic linguistics in Denmark, check the links above, and see below!
Post-court appearance interview with Professor Christiansen - Audio (in Danish)
Interview with Professor Christiansen - Text (in Danish)
In 2011, Apple and Microsoft (and eventually Amazon), went to court over the use of the name “App Store” by non-Apple companies. Shown above are the expert for Microsoft, Dr. Ron Butters, and the expert for Apple, Dr. Robert Leonard (sourced from namedropper on WordPress).
Although the term “app store”, as posited in the WordPress article, seems generic (and therefore exempt to being copyrighted in most cases), Apple won. Why? A few reasons!
The WordPress post linked above offers the example of “The Container Store”, an otherwise generic title that is, nevertheless, a registered trademark. This is because the trademark is famous—a technical term in copyright law—essentially meaning the name was registered, the company spent enough money and advertising on the name, and it went unchallenged for long enough for the generic name to become recognized as a non-generic brand.
In copyright law, The Container Store would actually be descriptive, and not generic, because it describes what they sell. Apple, for example, would only be generic if the company sold Apple brand apples—just like you can’t buy Salt™ brand salt at the grocery store.
Aside from being famous by the time of the lawsuit, the name App Store is, really, not even descriptive like The Container Store is. A store is a physical location where you buy a physical item which you now own. The App Store, on the other hand, has no physical products—and indeed you don’t own anything, you essentially license use of an app’s data.
This minor distinction is enough to consider the name App store not only famous, but non-generic and non-descriptive, and instead suggestive—another technical term in copyright law. That is, suggestive of a marketplace—albeit a digital one—in which apps can be “bought”. Microsoft itself is suggestive of microcomputer software.
The mark Apple itself would fall under the technical designation of arbitrary, as they sell computers, and not produce. (Incidentally, Apple got into another copyright suit with Apple Records, but won on the grounds that their products—technology and computer related goods, and published music, respectively—don’t interfere with one another, and there is no confusability between the products; just don’t expect Apple to sign any music contracts under their label any time soon!) Amazon, too, is arbitrary!
The final type of mark is fanciful, which are basically invented words, such as Xerox, which have no meaning outside the mark itself.
Forensic Linguistics on TV: The JonBenét Ramsey Case
Of all of the experts to join in on the analysis of the JonBenét Ramsey case for CBS’ two part special, the expert to assist in the analysis of the alleged ransom note was a trained forensic linguist. Jim Fitzgerald, in the video above, formerly of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and, has worked on many cases that attracted national attention, including the Unabomber case and the post 9/11 anthrax scare.
In the clip from MTV’s Unlocking the Truth, forensic linguist Dr. Robert Leonard of Hofstra University (formerly of Sha Na Na!) explains the effect of disfluencies in the language of an alleged witness in the case against Byron Case.
The hosts of Unlocking the Truth worked with the Hofstra Forensic Linguistics Capital Case Innocence Project to do a full analysis of all the language evidence in the Byron Case case, including conflicting witness testimony, and the confrontation call that led to Mr. Case’s arrest.
Find out more about the Byron Case case at freebyroncase.com and on MTV’s Unlocking the Truth.
Forensic Linguistics in the News: Kardashian/West on Twitter
Although pop culture does not generally fall within the purview of a forensic linguist—or indeed any forensic expert, we are sometimes asked by news outlets to render a professional opinion to an article under investigation.
That’s exactly what happened when The New York Daily News’ Confidenti@l looked into a 2016 incident with Kim Kardashian on Twitter, where her clapback to the likes of Piers Morgan and Bette Midler had fans and skeptics alike questioning whether the snappy tweets were written by Kim or Kanye—who is far more notorious for his Twitter quips.
The article linked above does a good job of explaining the results of the quick linguistic analysis, while the analysis itself is broken down below.
Of course, most forensic linguistic analyses, even when they deal with social media platforms such as Twitter, use features that exist at higher and deeper levels of language. But given the time crunch and interesting but otherwise largely inconsequential nature of the article, such analyses offer an interesting look into forensic linguistic for the lay reader.
Gender Identity Online - Dissertation Research Survey
I am a PhD candidate at Aston University in the field of forensic linguistics, with a dissertation focus in gendered language guising. If the study of language, gender, identity, and online communication are of interest to you, and you would like to help me collect data and conduct my research, please feel free to take the demographic survey provided below, or contact me here, via email at [email protected], or www.facebook.com/fldissertation
Survey Link
Please see below for a more detailed explanation of my research topic and goals, or feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions.
The field of my PhD is forensic linguistics—essentially language and the law—and the focus of my dissertation is on authorship analysis. What authorship analysis attempts to do, very simply, is compare the features of known authors suspected to have written a questioned document, and evaluate the likelihood that any overlapping features are indicative of common authorship between the two sets of data.
Often times in authorship cases, the questioned documents are written by someone attempting to disguise their own language so as to avoid being discovered as the document’s true author, or masquerade their language as that of someone else, whether that someone else is a real person, or a figment meant to facilitate the language disguise.
People do this either by simply attempting to make their guised language sound different from their usual language, or by attempting to adopt features of demographic groups to which they do not belong. It is this final tactic, specifically in the area of attempting to guise one’s gender, that is the focus of my research.
Much research has been done on various features of “gendered language” (though whether or not these features are complete or correct, and whether or not language can even be segmented and defined by a binary construct of gender is of very little concern or interest to my own research). But there is little to no research on the language features of people who are disguising their gender for whatever reason—that is, writing and presenting as a sex other than the one they identify with.
Most people who gender guise do not do so with any criminal or ill intent. By studying the language of people who guise their gender more casually, or who do not guise their gender at all, the aim of this research is to assist in authorship analysis and linguistic profiling.
The aim of my research is to study the language features of people who choose to present as different genders online. The goal is to better differentiate between the language of someone who is actually a particular gender, versus someone who may be pretending to be that gender as a means of disguising their own identity, or adopting the identity of someone else—by using, for example, features thought to be stereotypical of a particular gender’s language, which may actually be more overtly prevalent with someone of another gender attempting to disguise their own language by over-using those stereotypes, regardless of whether they hold true for people not disguising their genders.
I will be able to conduct my research with the help of participants like you, who only need to fill out a demographic survey, linked above, and give me permission to collect your post history for analysis. All data granted will be collected and compiled into a corpus, and will be fully anonymized. If you are over 18, and willing to aid in my research, and/or know others who may be, feel free to fill out the survey and pass the link along to friends.
If you are worried about the usefulness of your participation because you don’t ever guise your language (even by being an a-gendered entity online), please don’t worry. I need non-guised language just as much as I need guised language in order to establish a control If you do guise your language and are worried about sharing it (though in my experience people are very happy discuss the preference), please know that your information will not be shared, and that there is no judgment from me or anyone involved in helping me attain my research goals.
Most importantly, it is not my intention to offend anyone with this research, though I realize gender and identity can be very personal topics for almost—if not actually—everyone. I have done my best, with the help and input of friends and colleagues, to mitigate any potential offense, but if you have any qualms with how any facet of my research is being conducted, again, please feel free to contact me, and I will be more than happy to attempt to address your concerns.
Finally, thank you to anyone who has or intends to help, is interested in my research, or who has simply read this far and given me the chance to propose my aims and wishes, as I will be relying heavily on the curiosity and generosity of people like you in order to conduct what I hope will be important, progressive research in my field.
