Deceptive discourse is a particular research interest of mine. Something that may illuminate Kerry’s case was touched on in an article I had published in the International Journal of Speech, Language and Law (formerly ‘Forensic Linguistics’) in December 2003 called ‘Massaging the Evidence: the “Over-Working” of Witness Statements in Civil Cases’.
As a bit of background, an eminent attorney, George Hampel QC, says that ‘the art of persuasion…involves creating or changing perceptions to influence the result’. Narratives play a very important part in court (and out if it) in creating these perceptions. Thus, from my own experience, while written witness statements are officially and ostensibly consist of ‘evidence as to facts’, in fact their essence lies in their emotive effect (bursts of direct speech added to the narrative to endorse authenticity is a good example).
In a section of my paper called ‘Reconstruction: Resolving Contradictions through Retelling’, I analyse a scenario in which the witness statement of the defendant functions to correct the witness statement of a friendly witness. The correction, as you will see, was necessary because of a foul-up over dates.
The witness is writing about complaints made about the plaintiff:
‘The plaintiff was responsible for teaching the module, and the first session was taught in rooms 104 & 105 of the [name of building] on 1st April 1999. The day following that session, I bumped into several students in the [name of building] and they told me that many of them had left during the break between the first half and the second half of the three-hour session.’
After three paragraphs detailing the students’ complaints, the witness continues:
‘In view of the students’ concerns, I subsequently told the defendant about this matter after a meeting on 7th April 1999.’
In the next paragraph, the witness explicitly spells out the date of her meeting with the students:
‘Having heard the complaints from the students on 2nd April 1999, I was a little concerned, so I attended the second grammar session on 8th April 1999.’
Thus, the witness twice specifies that it was on the day after the first session, ‘2nd April 1999’, that she was told by unhappy students about the plaintiff’s unsatisfactory teaching performance.
In *her * witness statement, however, although the defendant refers, in common with the witness, to a discussion that they had ‘after a meeting … on 7th April’, unlike the witness, she refers to the source of the complaints as telephone calls:
‘After a meeting in the afternoon on 7th April, [the witness] came up to me and told me that she had had several phone calls from her students complaining about the plaintiff’s first session.’
In my paper, I explain the significance of this shift in detail thus:
‘Central to any understanding of the difference in the two versions is the fact that, in 1999, Friday 2nd April was Good Friday and a public holiday. Whether or not the shift in specification of the channel of communication between the witness and the students in the defendant’s account was motivated by the realisation that a face-to-face teacher/student conversation was unlikely to have occurred on a public holiday, what is very marked is that the defendant should take steps to explicitly specify the mode whereby one third party, a group of students, had communicated with another third party, the witness. In this respect, she would appear to be answering a question that no one – except perhaps the lawyers – is actually asking.’
Incidentally, I tend towards a belief in cock-ups rather than conspiracy (except where conspiracy can be “proven”). But the cock-ups, and resultant cover-ups and attempts to cloud the water and confuse, testify to the darkness of the human heart when one’s livelihood is under threat.