Forensic Linguistics

This chapter discusses murder, kidnapping, and other types of cases in which experts in forensic linguistics used scientific language analysis to help investigators and triers of fact extract maximum intelligence from language evidence such as letters, e-mails, notes, wills, texts, confessions, and recorded speech. In the Charlene Hummert murder case, the Pennsylvania State Police Major Case Team asked the author to analyze a stalker letter and a serial killer letter to build profiles of the unknown authors. Linguistic demographic profiling narrows the suspect pool of possible authors; then, with samples from suspects, an authorship analysis further narrows the pool to include or exclude individual suspects. Forensic linguistics has assisted in criminal investigations, threat assessment, counterterrorism, fraud detection, company-internal sabotage, and many other areas of forensic interest that involve the use of language. This scientific linguistic analysis has been accepted in the courts—in the Hummert case for example, the author testified as a witness for the prosecution.