Captured on tape: professional hearing and competing entextualizations in the criminal justice system

Abstract

A growing body of discourse-analytic studies demonstrates that within the legal system, spoken language that undergoes entextualization is transformed in a variety of sociopolitically consequential ways. Through the analysis of a legal case involving the institutional entextualization of incriminating language—an FBI summary log of wiretapped telephone calls between suspected drug dealers—the article argues that practices of professional hearing and transcription on behalf of institutions of law enforcement systematically work to the disadvantage of suspects and defendants. At the same time, discourse analysts who intervene in the justice system as linguistic experts offer competing representations of suspects' and defendants' language rooted in their own practices of professional hearing and their own institutional goals. Legal entextualizations, whether weighted in favor of or against defendants, present dialogically constructed representations of discourse as monologic and objective facts in order to foster an ideology of institutional neutrality. This process allows legal institutions to “create their own reality” by regimenting talk through textual representation in order to promote their own authority and interests.