A forensic linguistic investigation of witness statements on murder cases at Windhoek police station

Abstract

This study presents the applications of forensic linguistics with special emphasis on the interpretation of articulated interpretation of intended meanings in written statements, discourse analysis, authorship identification, and meaning in legislation and legal texts are only a few examples. This study investigated the primary written witness statements, following the objectives of the study. The study aimed to examine the witness statements' grammatical patterns in order to assess the lexical evidence, as well as investigate discourse structures in witness statements. It used forensic linguistic as its theoretical framework using the qualitative approach as defined by Creswell (2013). An explanatory study methodology was used for this study. The sample size of 100 witness statements from 20 dockets were analysed, using the content analysis checklist. Considering the lexical analysis as one of the study objectives, the findings of the study indicated that witnesses use words such as cellphone face cover, check-up, disembark, reraxeces, heared, stoep, tailed, just to mention but few, that investigators, lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, and judges might find confusing and lead to misinterpretation, making it difficult for them to comprehend the meaning. Following the second objective of the study, which is the syntactic structure, the findings also revealed that, some witnesses have no knowledge on the murder cases they are interviewed about, which results in them giving irrelevant phrases which may prolong cases. Furthermore, the data collected indicated that, witness statements’ sentences are full of grammatical errors which legal experts might not be able to get the intended meaning. Additionally, regarding the objectives of study, the discourse in witness statements showed that language structure remains a problem within witness statements, and this is because police officers and investigators are not forensic linguistics experts to write comprehensive statements. The researcher also found out that correspondence (which is the communication between the witnesses and the police) within witness statements and the relationships might lead to wrongful arrest. The study recommends that, police officers who write statements need to be fluent in English to avoid grammatical errors and direct translation and misleading information. Witness statements need to be written either in the vernacular languages of the witnesses in order for them to be able to express themselves fully and to avoid misinterpretation of intended meaning. A forensic linguist should be present to provide an unbiased assessment of the procedure. The study concluded that, the language structure is believed to play a critical role in analysing witness statements.