News and events
2026 Seminars
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3 June 2026
This seminar examines the intersection of forensic linguistics, human rights evidence, and the admissibility of expert testimony within the court systems. While forensic linguistics has emerged as an important interdisciplinary field, those who are involved in presenting this as evidence in court settings are not always familiar with human rights laws relating to expert testimony.The seminar explores the legal standards governing expert witnesses and the admissibility of forensic linguistic evidence in courts. Particular attention is given to evidentiary frameworks such as the Daubert standard, and comparable international approaches that evaluate the reliability, relevance, and methodological validity of expert testimony. The seminar will discuss Human Rights law and the challenges surrounding objectivity, bias, translation accuracy, and the ethical responsibilities of forensic linguists serving as expert witness in legal proceedings.--
About the author
Dr Catherine Creamer is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast. She has 20 years postgraduate experience, providing psychosocial and clinical interventions to adults and children in clinical and forensic settings; both in-patient and community mental health, community outreach and providing expert testimony and advice to the Courts, Parole Board and Mental Health Tribunals.Catherine has been a Consultant Forensic Expert to the European Union, Council of Europe, since 2009 working on human rights projects relating to risk assessment, rehabilitation, mental health, and counter-terrorism. She has been a short-term consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes. -
by Eleanor KettleThe way that the law handles transcripts of spoken language evidence (such as police interviews, or covert audio recordings) has led to known cases of 'transcript injustice' (Fraser et al, 2025). Many well-known mis-transcriptions feature non-mainstream varieties of English (NMVE). For example, a speaker with a ‘very strong West Indian accent’ was mis-transcribed by police as saying he got on a train and shot a man to kill, but was later found to have said he got on a train and show[ed] a man ticket (Coulthard et al., 2017, p. 132).This talk will present findings from recent research relating to the forensic transcription of audio featuring NMVE. This research aligns with the Hub's aim of developing an evidence-based process for forensic transcription to ensure that only reliable transcripts of indistinct forensic audio are provided as assistance to the court.----About the authorEleanor Kettle is a PhD student and Research Assistant with the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence in the School of Languages and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne.----Coulthard, M., Johnson, A., & Wright, D. (2017). An Introduction to Forensic Linguistics: Language in Evidence. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315630311Fraser, H. et al, (2025). New linguistics research casts doubt on decades-old murder conviction. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/new-linguistics-research-casts-doubt-on-decades-old-murder-conviction-267425
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4 March
Stephen ‘Shorty’ Jamieson was a homeless 22-year-old when – on the basis of his nickname – he was charged with the brutal 1988 abduction, rape, and murder of Janine Balding.
Two years later, he was sentenced to life in prison, where he remains to this day.
Yet the major evidence against him was an apparent confession transcribed by detectives as a ‘record of interview’ – under conditions that have now been acknowledged at the highest levels to pose a significant risk of ‘verballing’ (presenting a confession that was never really made).
Join an expert panel to hear the facts of Stephen’s case and consider its ongoing relevance in 2026. Followed by Q and A.
The Panel:
Peter Breen
- Solicitor, former politician, long-time supporter of Stephen Jamieson.
- Author of Shorty: Mistaken Identity or Stitch-Up (Wilkinson Publishing).
- Recent guest on podcast Australian True Crime episode ‘Never to be released?’
Professor Michele Ruyters
- Director of Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative (BOHII)
- Currently investigating Stephen Jamieson’s case.
Associate Professor Rod Gardner
- Linguistics expert, University of Queensland.
- Provided compelling evidence in Stephen Jamieson’s 2001 application to have his conviction reviewed – rejected by the reviewing judge for very unsatisfactory reasons.
Professor Helen Fraser
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Read this recent piece in Pursuit where Professor Helen Fraser examines the Stephen ‘Shorty Jamieson’ case and how this case may not be unique.
2025 Seminars
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by Prof Tammy Gales, Hofstra University, New York | 6 November 2025
Police reports are a cornerstone of the criminal justice system. They are the official record of an event, documenting the date, time, location, and participants involved; they serve as a reference point for further investigation; and they become vital narratives in court proceedings. Thus, their composition is a key responsibility of police officers.
In 2024, however, the law enforcement community was introduced to AI-assisted software that transfers that responsibility to an AI-assisted tool. Working from the audio recordings captured by body worn cameras (BWC), the tool first generates a transcript and then drafts a police report, all within minutes.
Despite “human-in-the-loop” safety protocols built into the tool, current linguistic research suggests that the resulting reports will still be problematic. For instance, in related AI contexts, scholars have found that transcripts produced by talk-to-text programs (such as those relied upon by the report-writing software) can be fraught with errors due to ambient noise, non-standard language use, unfamiliar accents, overlapping speech, and variations in voice due to trauma or fear. Additionally, while steps have been taken to reduce overt racism in AI-generated texts, covert racism remains. Finally, while chatbots have the capacity to process fairly transparent pragmatic meaning accurately (e.g., canonical apologies), they still have difficulties with non-canonical forms.
Examples generated by this tool, and supplemental user feedback, confirm the existence of some of these issues and raise additional concerns, demonstrating the need for more research and further discussion about the responsible use of AI in the composition of such a consequential document within the criminal justice system.
Dr. Tammy Gales is Professor of Linguistics and Director of Research at the Institute for Forensic Linguistics at Hofstra University, New York. She is currently the President of the International Association for Forensic and Legal Linguistics (IAFLL) and co-editor of the Elements in Forensic Linguistics series from Cambridge University Press.
Gales’ research interests cross the boundaries of forensic linguistics and language and the law. Within the first strand, she applies corpus and discourse analytic methods to the examination of authorial stance in threatening communications, cross-examinations of assault victims, and parole board hearings in which certain populations are disproportionately denied parole. Within the second, she applies corpus linguistic methods to the investigation of disputed meanings in legal statutes and trademark cases. Her recent projects include the newly-released Speaking of Crime: The Language of Criminal Justice, 2nd edition (with Larry Solan and Peter Tiersma), and the in-progress Corpus Linguistics and the Interpretation of Statutes across Time (with Kevin Tobia and Larry Solan).
Gales frequently serves as a linguistic consultant and expert witness on civil and criminal matters, has trained law enforcement and legal professionals across Canada and the US, and is a trained lexicographer, having worked in the UK for Longman and Bloomsbury Publishing.
https://www.hofstra.edu/faculty-profile/?id=3587; https://www.tammygales.com/
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Read this recent piece in The Conversation where Professor Helen Fraser and other experts examine the case in terms of a fresh analysis of Jamieson’s case conducted by The Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence.
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By Prof Georgina Heydon, Criminology and Justice Studies, RMIT | 8 October 2025
Within forensic linguistics, there is a long history of case studies and research exposing weaknesses in the use of written versions of spoken evidence. More recently, this has included work on transcription of unclear speech (Fraser 2022) and the interaction between transcription and translation (Gilbert and Heydon 2021), but some of the earliest forensic linguistic case work involved interview case notes (Coulthard 2002), with such concerns still relevant in forensic psychology (Milne, Nunan, Hope, Hodgkins and Clarke 2022) , particularly in the climate of global efforts to improve and standardise interviewing practices through the Mendez Principles. Nonetheless, note-taking continues to provide the main means of recording evidence and witness testimony around the world. This presentation begins with an expert witness report from a bank robbery trial about the reliability of written records of conversations between detectives and a key witness-turned-suspect in the case. This paper asks what our role might be in overturning legal practices that rely on linguistic fallacies, including, but not limited to, the assumptions about the accuracy of contemporaneous notes.
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by Dr Zakeera Docrat | 3 September 2025
South Africa has 12 official languages that enjoy constitutional protection and promotion. Theoretically, the language rights framework provides extensive support and protection for indigenous language speakers accessing the legal system. From a point of practice, however the framework fails at various implementation stages. The 2017 English language of record decision marginalised the use of the indigenous languages while placing extra strain on a fragile interpretation profession.
In this presentation, I will focus on the criminal justice system, identifying the language-related challenges associated with police statement taking and its effects on witness credibility during oral evidence. The presentation focusses on the challenges facing police officers, court intermediaries and interpreters and the impact on complainants seeking justice.
I will discuss the cases of State v Pistorius (2014); State v van Breda (2019); State v Omotoso (2018); the Meyiwa murder trial as well as the ongoing Mbenenge Judicial Conduct Tribunal. These cases together with other examples will highlight the language complexities in the South African criminal justice system in relation to language, culture and power. As part of the recommendations, I will present the ongoing developmental Thoka App for police statement taking.
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by Helen Fraser, Director of the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence | 6 August 2025
When forensic audio is of such noisy quality that the content can barely be heard, noise reduction techniques seem to offer a foolproof solution. Strangely, however, though these 'enhancing' methods work brilliantly on intelligible but unpleasant recordings, when speech is hard to hear, they often have an effect opposite to the one intended.
Far from making indistinct speech clearer, even the latest AI models typically reduce its intelligibility, and can actually encourage inaccurate perception. Nevertheless, enhanced audio is routinely admitted in criminal trials, in the false belief that it can assist the court in understanding crucial evidence.
Today’s seminar investigates this paradoxical situation through case studies and experimental results. Why does noise reduction have this puzzling effect on indistinct audio? Why do the courts nevertheless put faith in it? What do the counter-intuitive results reveal about human speech perception? How can the answers be used to improve justice and increase scientific understanding?
This will be a fun one with plenty of audio examples. Beyond the ‘wow!’ response, it raises exciting challenges for both law and speech science, taking us to the heart of the Hub’s reason for existence.
Prof Helen Fraser is the Director of the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence. For more than a decade she has taken an active research interest in the perception of enhanced forensic audio, especially how it is affected by an accurate or inaccurate transcript.
https://forensictranscription.net.au; https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/31457-helen-fraser
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by Emeritus Professor Stephen Cordner, Victoria Institute of Forensic Medicine | 4 June 2025
If one was devising a scheme to resolve a scientific or medical question, one would not immediately think that employing two barristers, a judge, and a jury of twelve people off the street was the best way to go. Given the huge number and variety of different areas of expertise, it is remarkable that that approach seems to work as well as it does. Or does it? Is it fair to leave knotty problems within specialised areas to non-experts, and if not, how should such problems be resolved for the purposes of particular trials. This conundrum in all its magnitude will not be solved in this presentation, but will be discussed with particular reference to forensic medicine and some recent cases.
Stephen Cordner graduated in Medicine from The University of Melbourne in 1977. After his internship at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and two years in the Department of Pathology at Geelong Hospital he took up an appointment in 1981 as Lecturer, and later Senior Lecturer, in Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. He stayed there until 1987 working as a Home Office Pathologist. During this period he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia and the Royal College of Pathologists of Great Britain.
Stephen was appointed Foundation Professor of Forensic Medicine at Monash University and Foundation Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine in 1987. He retired as Director in 2014 and returned to operational forensic pathology work, teaching and training. He has worked as a Consultant to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), exploring the potential for humanitarian contributions from forensic pathology. This has involved missions to Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Myanmar, The Philippines, Liberia, Nepal, Palestine and Afghanistan, not only for ICRC but also WHO and UNODC. Over the last 20 years one of his particular interests has been wrongful convictions, leading in late 2023 to the publication, with Adjunct Prof Kerry Breen, of Wrongful Convictions in Australia.
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by Professor Michele Ruyters, RMIT | 7 May 2025
When determining the admissibility of police interviews, judges are often required to assess defendants’ language competence – an area outside their formal expertise.
Through an analysis of Australian case law, this seminar explores how judges’ assumptions about their capacities to evaluate linguistic competence and resist bias can compromise judicial decision-making and result in a miscarriage of justice.
Professor Michele Ruyters is Associate Dean of Criminology and Justice Studies at RMIT University and director of RMIT’s Bridge of Hope Innocence Initiative. Dr Ruyters’ practice and research interests are in wrongful convictions, official misconduct, policing accountability, parole reform, and the lived experiences of the wrongfully convicted.
2024 Seminars
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by Prof Jane Goodman-Delahunty, University of Newcastle
Evidence that is misconstrued can result in wrongful convictions or acquittals. To avoid these errors, juries may be assisted by educational information presented by an expert witness. That does not mean juries get it right. To assess the effectiveness of this legal intervention, trial simulation research is necessary. Pretest-posttest research designs can capture knowledge change, and the impact of expert evidence. Comparisons of individual juror decisions with those of juries after deliberation reveal the effects of group deliberation on case outcomes. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of deliberations expose how juries make meaning from evidence, apply verdict-driven or evidence-driven strategies, and the presence and extent of threats to justice, such as common jury errors and unfair prejudice. This presentation is illustrated by examples drawn from trial simulation studies, and their contributions to legal reforms are discussed.
Jane Goodman-Delahunty, BA, TTHD, JD, PhD, is a transdisciplinary scholar, trained in Law and Experimental Psychology. She conducts empirical research supporting policies to advance justice. She is a Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Newcastle.
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On Sunday 24 November 2024, Prof Helen Fraser appeared on the national investigative journalism program, 60 Minutes (Channel 9), along with several other experts. Prof Fraser described serious problems with the unverified transcript that convicted Stephen ‘Shorty’ Jamieson for the 1988 murder of Janine Balding. Jamieson has in prison for over 36 years on the basis of a confession he allegedly made during a police interview transcribed by one of the detectives. His lawyers are now seeking an inquiry into his case. Watch the 90-second preview below.
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by Miranda Lai
In criminal investigations, law enforcement agencies sometime have to rely on lawful interception and surveillance to access private communications. These covertly collected materials, if deemed relevant, may be admitted as forensic evidence in court, where prosecution simply let the defendant’s own words caught “on tape” speak for themselves. When such evidence includes content in foreign language(s), translators and interpreters—an "invisible" yet essential group of professionals—play a critical role in producing translations into English, so the trier of fact can understand the material. This process poses unique challenges, as the translation is admitted as evidence, in addition to the recording, regardless of audio clarity. Forensic translation in this context requires converting spoken input into written output, a distinct process from the conventional tasks for which translators and interpreters are typically trained for, that is to produce written output from written sources or oral output from spoken input. This presentation examines the current landscape in Australia regarding the involvement of translators and interpreters in this type of hybrid task, arguing for evidence-based enhancements to existing training and workflows to uphold the accuracy and reliability standards essential for the evidentiary materials they are tasked to produce.
Dr Miranda Lai is a senior lecturer in interpreting and translating studies at RMIT University. She completed a PhD in interpreter-mediated police investigative interviews, looking into how interpreters facilitated or unknowingly interfered with such processes. Her research interests include public service interpreting and translation, police interpreting, forensic transcription and translation, and vicarious trauma for translators and interpreters.
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by Frank Mollica
There is an abundance of evidence that human languages are shaped by principles of efficient communication. Yet, there is one notable exception: legalese. It’s widely acknowledged that the register of language we use to codify the numerous laws, agreements and obligations in modern civilizations is difficult to use and understand. In this talk, I’ll discuss our corpus and behavioural investigations with lawyers answering 1) how harmful is legalese to language processing, 2) which linguistic properties of legalese are doing the damage (hint: they’re in the abstract) and 3) why do lawyers use legalese. Luckily, our results suggest that the harm of legalese can be easily mitigated. The dominant barrier to change is the inertia of the existing system. If there’s time, I’ll discuss ongoing work investigating why we started using legalese in the first place? So, since the dawn of civilization we’ve needed laws, come to the talk to find out why have we laid them down so inefficiently
Frank Mollica is a new Lecturer in Computational Cognitive Science at the Complex Human Data Hub, School of Psychological Science, University of Melbourne. He remains an Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Language, Cognition at Computation, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh and an associate member of the Center for Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh. Frank uses computational and experimental techniques to investigate how children and adults construct rich conceptual systems that support everyday cognition and how these conceptual systems interface with language. Frank’s work on legal language has won an IgNobel Prize, for science that makes you laugh then think, and the Cognitive Science Society’s applied Cognitive Modelling Prize. On winter breaks, you’re likely to find Frank hiking somewhere in the Scottish highlands.
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by Dr Vincent Aubanel
Forensic speech enhancement (FSE) appears to be a straightforward endeavour aimed at improving the quality of speech recordings presented in court. However, its execution has often fallen short of scientific standards, sometimes leading to negative outcomes and miscarriages of justice. In this talk I will present current issues in FSE from a speech research perspective, however highlighting its interdisciplinary nature. I will introduce ongoing projects and initiatives at the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence, including the development of FSEEL (Forensic Speech Enhancement for Expert Listening), an innovative platform dedicated to the evaluation of FSE using quantitative and replicable methods. The aim of this talk will be to foster discussion on reforming FSE practices, with the overarching goal of ensuring more reliable and scientifically grounded methods in criminal justice.
Dr. Vincent Aubanel studied Phonetics, Music Technology and Computer Science before obtaining a PhD in Phonetics from Aix-Marseille University (Laboratoire Parole et Langage) in 2011. Since then he has held several postdoctoral positions in Spain (Ikerbasque), Australia (MARCS Institute) and France (GIPSA-lab) before joining the Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne in 2024 as a Research Fellow. His main interests are forensic speech, speech perception in noise and speech rhythm.
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3 July
Translation as Reframing: Recontextualisation of the Attitudinal Positionings in Bilingual Legal Judgments
By Wei (Wendy) YU
In the “uncommon” bilingual jurisdiction of common law in Hong Kong, judges can draft their legal judgments in both languages—Chinese and English. Judges can use either language, subject to the circumstances. This presentation will focus on the linguistic nuances of the two language versions via translation. As indicated in the title, I argue that translation, done by either legal translators or judges themselves, functions as a way of reframing and recontextualising the attitudinal positionings in the original version. In this presentation, I will cover the background of the linguistic landscape of Hong Kong’s legal system, the basic information of the selected cases for analysis, key findings and the interpretation, uncovering the underlying ideologies.
Wei YU is a PhD candidate from Asia Institute, under the supervision of Professor Yongxian Luo and Professor Jia Gao.
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5 June
"Feel sorry for your ears": Exploring challenges in transcribing speech with unknown content in unfamiliar varieties
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In many branches of linguistics, the researcher (transcriber) knows the content of recorded speech (what is being said), and the challenge is how to best represent the linguistic features being studied (eg. with IPA symbols). In forensic transcription, the situation is flipped: the transcription part is relatively straightforward (using simple spelling), but the challenge is that the content of the recorded speech is unknown (or even contested). So why is forensic transcription so difficult? This talk will explore the roles of bottom-up and top-down information in speech perception, with examples from recent experiments highlighting the crucial role of top-down information. This leads to the key question of which types of top-down information are relevant to the reliable transcription of forensic audio of unfamiliar varieties, focusing on one transcriber's experience with an unfamiliar variety of English.
Eleanor is a second-year PhD student in the School of Languages and Linguistics, supervised by Helen Fraser, Olga Maxwell, Debbie Loakes
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by Helen Fraser
We have all seen the ‘priming’ examples** demonstrating the dangers of using police transcripts to assist the courts in understanding indistinct forensic audio, and the ineffectiveness of the ‘safeguards’ relied on by the law, such as instructing the jury to listen carefully using the transcript only as assistance. But we still have the question: ‘How should indistinct forensic audio be deciphered and transcribed, and how should transcripts be used in court?’. It is a more complex issue than many realise.
This presentation is an opportunity to hear the recommendations being developed by the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence, catch up on the Hub’s recent research findings, ask questions, and offer your input and suggestions. The discussion is aimed at those with a linguistics background, but should be accessible more broadly.
Prof Helen Fraser is Director of the Research Hub for Language in Forensic Evidence at the University of Melbourne, with a research specialisation in forensic transcription.
**Not sure about the priming examples? Check out forensictranscriptiion.net.au
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By Lois Fairclough
The interaction between phonetics and the forensic setting is complex. Although forensic phonetics is an ever-growing and innovative field, only some of the research findings translate into changes in judicial ruling. My research is centred around the use of formant frequencies as an acoustic parameter for forensic phonetic application. Although research has shown they are good at distinguishing speakers from one another relative to some other acoustic parameters, they are by no means proven reliable - particularly in speech encountered in forensic casework. In the UK, a legal ruling from over 20 years ago [R v O’Doherty, NICA 2002] requires practitioners to present formant frequency measurements in their analysis. This seems problematic given their known variability and sensitivity to a range of factors encountered in forensic settings. Findings thus far show considerable variability within and between practitioners, as well as between different softwares when measuring formants using good quality spontaneous speech data. Further work will provide a thorough investigation of how the choice of parameters in speaker discrimination tasks can influence evidential output. By furnishing a thorough analysis of this parameter, for its duration in casework, it can be duly considered in the presentation of expert evidence.
Lois Fairclough is a PhD Student studying forensic phonetics under the guidance of Dr Georgina Brown, Department of Linguistics and English Language (LAEL), Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) University of Lancaster.
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