Perjury cases and the linguist
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Roger W. Shuy
Abstract
Other chapters in this book deal with research and theory about lying, ethics, deception, bluffing, puffing, trickery, deceit, and morality in public and private life. This chapter describes the U.S. statutes concerning perjury and provides examples of how linguistic analyses were used with the language evidence in four representative perjury cases. Linguists retained to examine the language evidence in perjury cases must first accommodate their analyses to the boundaries of perjury law. For this reason, United States statutes for perjury are first discussed. This is followed by a description of the important roles played by prosecutors, judges, and jurors who evaluate the language evidence. Finally, four perjury cases describe the way linguistic analysis has been used when a linguist was retained by either the defense or the prosecution.
Abstract
Other chapters in this book deal with research and theory about lying, ethics, deception, bluffing, puffing, trickery, deceit, and morality in public and private life. This chapter describes the U.S. statutes concerning perjury and provides examples of how linguistic analyses were used with the language evidence in four representative perjury cases. Linguists retained to examine the language evidence in perjury cases must first accommodate their analyses to the boundaries of perjury law. For this reason, United States statutes for perjury are first discussed. This is followed by a description of the important roles played by prosecutors, judges, and jurors who evaluate the language evidence. Finally, four perjury cases describe the way linguistic analysis has been used when a linguist was retained by either the defense or the prosecution.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
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II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
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III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
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IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Contents VII
- Introduction: On lying and disleading 1
-
I Lies and deception: The landscape of falsehood
- Lying, deception, and related concepts: A conceptual map for ethics 15
- The morality of deception 41
- Kant tell an a priori lie 65
-
II Lying, deception, and speaker commitment: Empirical evidence
- Is lying morally different from misleading? An empirical investigation 89
- “I was only quoting”: Shifting viewpoint and speaker commitment 113
- Memefying deception and deceptive memefication: Multimodal deception on social media 139
-
III Puffery, bluffery, bullshit: How to not quite lie
- Bald-faced bullshit and authoritarian political speech: Making sense of Johnson and Trump 165
- Practice to deceive: A natural history of the legal bluff 195
- Just saying, just kidding: Liability for accountability-avoiding speech in ordinary conversation, politics and law 227
-
IV Crossing the perjury threshold: Deceit and falsehood in the courtroom
- Perjury cases and the linguist 261
- Trickery and deceit: How the pragmatics of interrogation leads innocent people to confess – and factfinders to believe their confessions 289
- The context of mistrust: Perjury ascriptions in the courtroom 309
- What counts as a lie in and out of the courtroom? The effect of discourse genre on lie judgments 353
- Lies, deception, and bullshit in law 381
- Index 409
