It seems to me that in many (if not most) jurisdictions, in order to be charged and tried with a crime the defendant must understand the charges and, should the matter go to trial, be able to understand the pleas, enter one, and assist in his own defence. Defendants who do not speak the language of the court are therefore expected to avail themselves of the services of an interpreter; in many cases the court will provide one free of charge.
My question is this: for jurisdictions in which the above two assumptions hold, what happens if it is not possible to locate an interpreter who speaks the defendant’s language? This could be the case with monolingual speakers of very rare languages. Let’s say the defendant is a monolingual speaker of some endangered tongue with only a handful of fluent speakers left; none of them speak the court language either, or else don’t wish to serve as an interpreter (and being outside the jurisdiction of the court, cannot be compelled to serve as one). Has such a case ever arisen, and if so, how did the legal system deal with it?
It seems to me there would be only three options which wouldn’t violate the defendant’s right to defend himself:
[ol]
[li]Compel the defendant to learn the language of the court. However, this would probably mean keeping him detained for a year or two, which may infringe upon other rights granted by the jurisdiction, such as that to a speedy trial, or to be charged within a certain time of being arrested. It would also be particularly expensive, as it would require a full-time language teacher.[/li][li]Hire an interpreter to learn the language of the defendant. This has the same problems as the first option, and is probably even more expensive (and possibly even wholly impractical in the case of poorly documented languages).[/li][li]Release the defendant without charge, or with charges dropped. This option is unattractive for cases where guilt is obvious, but what else can the court do except the above two options?[/li][/ol]
Am I missing any options here? If not, it seems that to commit the perfect murder, all one needs do is recruit a monolingual hit man who speaks an endangered language, preferably from some place far, far away.
For one thing many countries don’t even bother to provide a translator, even for a language as common as english.
I can recall a few court cases where the language the accused spoke was rare enough the court was actually inquiring with the local college for linguists or attempting to find native speakers via immigrant community groups etc. But the accused is sitting in lock up the entire time.
As long as you’re reasonably sure the court in whose jurisdiction the murder is to be committed can’t compel you to serve as an interpreter, then you hire him speaking his language. (Or, less preferably but perhaps more practically, you could use a sympathetic bilingual speaker outside the jursidiction of the court to assist with the negotiations.)
In the case of Japan, if you can’t speak Japanese, then you’re out of luck. I was asked to translate, one day, for an Eastern European girl to her adoptive British dad, because she wasn’t allowed to speak anything but Japanese so long as she remained in custody.
Actually, I wasn’t allowed to speak English either. I had to memorize all of his questions before going in, and all of her responses to tell him when we left. He had to just sit and listen to us talking in a foreign language.
I once saw an ad asking for a court translator between Catalan and English, for a trial in London. I’m 100% sure it was a delaying tactic, given that there are very few people who are monolingual in Catalan and they’re unlikely to be found in London, but hey… the court was obligated to provide a translator and they were doing their utmost best to find one. No idea whether one was found or what happened if not.
A variant of the OP could be this: Suppose the accused PRETENDS that he understands only the one rare language, when in actuality he also understands other languages too.
I once had a conversation with a prison official in Germany.
They had a man from China in custody who was accused of a crime but hadn’t yet been tried. It turned out that this gentleman was a native speaker - and only spoke - one of the many minority languages in China.
The prison official said that they hadn’t neither been able to find an interpreter nor to communicate with the man at all. They couldn’t even ask him what his name was.
Don’t know how this situation was resolved eventually.
If the court has reason to believe the accused is only pretending, then in many jurisdictions he’ll end up being imprisoned for contempt until such time as he cooperates. People have been detained for contempt for years (14 in one notorious case) because some judge thought (rightly or wrongly) that they were withholding information.
Historically, lack of comprehension has not been a problem. For example, in Stelvio in 1519, they prosecuted moles and in 1545 the residents of St Julien held a mass trial of vine weevils. The last such case was 1906 when a dog was prosecuted for robbing and killing a man.
Cite: The Law’s Strangest Cases, ‘The accused have gone to ground’, Peter Seddon ISBN 1-86105-463-7
In cases like that, how do the officials even know what language the accused speaks? Do they tape-record him saying whatever shit he says and then pass around the recording until someone says, “Oh, hey, that sounds familiar.”
You can probably narrow down the possibilities significantly by looking for non-linguistic clues, such as the accused’s ID—if he’s got a Chinese passport, chances are he speaks one of the Chinese languages. From there enlisting the help of the local university’s linguistics and/or Chinese studies department might help. Even if no one there recognizes the spoken language, they might have written samples of other candidates (or know where to look for them) which the suspect could recognize.
IIRC correctly, they originally had an interpreter for Mandarin or Cantonese who was able to identify the language, yet wasn’t able to speak it himself.
