Forensic transcription
When people think of transcription in the context of legal cases, they usually think first of courtroom transcription - the production of transcripts of all the court proceedings.
However, transcripts are also used in the cases themselves, notably to accompany evidence that is produced in the form of audio or video recordings. This type of transcript is very different. The task of writing down what someone has said may seem like a very simple process - but in fact it harbours a number of problematic issues, especially if the listening conditions are poor.
Fraser, Helen. 2003. Issues in Transcription: Factors affecting the reliability of transcripts as evidence in legal cases. International Journal of Speech Language and the Law 10:203-226.
Fraser, Helen. to appear. Evaluating transcripts for use in the legal system. H. Selby and I. Freckelton Expert Evidence Sydney: Lawbook Co.
Transcription plays an important role in many parts of the legal process. For example:
- transcripts of courtroom proceedings provide a lasting public record of events,
- transcripts routinely accompany electronic records of interviews by police or others,
- transcripts accompany evidence presented in the form of audio or video recordings.
All of these artefacts are called ‘transcripts’, but there is clearly a significant difference in their status. While the accuracy of courtroom transcripts is accepted as a cornerstone of the legal process, the correct transcription of audio presented in evidence can be the subject of vigorous but ultimately unresolvable dispute. Consider, for example, David Eastman’s whispered soliloquy recorded by a listening device in his house after the shooting of Colin Winchester. Did it contain the words "I killed Winchester", or were the words rather "I kept watching her”? There is no way to be absolutely certain.
Between these two extremes lie many points on a long continuum of accuracy and verifiability. In using transcripts of various kinds, it is clearly essential to locate them at the appropriate point in that continuum. This is not only to avoid giving too much credence to potentially inaccurate transcripts of barely audible recordings. Treating courtroom transcripts as no more reliable than the Eastman transcript would cause problems at least as great.
In order to make and use the necessary distinctions among transcripts of varying degrees of reliability, it is first necessary to set up a framework within which the creation and interpretation of transcripts can be understood. That is the task of the first part of this chapter. Later sections consider factors that affect the reliability of transcripts, and put forward suggested procedures for creating and evaluating transcripts to be used in court.