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The voice of law and the voice of medicine confronted: Interactional strategies in expert witness cross-examination

Authors: Szczyrbak Magdalena Adriana

Year: 2021

Type of publication: ostatní - přednáška nebo poster

Page from-to: nestránkováno

Titles:

Language	Name	Abstract	Keywords
eng	The voice of law and the voice of medicine confronted: Interactional strategies in expert witness cross-examination	Expert testimony has been the focus of numerous legal, psychological and philosophical studies (Ward, 2017). Lawyer-witness interaction, in turn, has been a prominent research area in linguistic scholarship, looking at such aspects as questioning strategies, manifestation of power and authority, and the effect of presentational style on juries (Cotterill, 2003; Heffer, 2005). Since expert witnesses do not report what they have personally experienced or observed, they offer assessments based on “sufficient facts or data”, and they communicate expert knowledge with a “reasonable degree of scientific (or discipline) certainty.” This finds reflection in the linguistic practices such witnesses pursue when interacting with the counsel and in the questioning tactics which the opposing counsel employ to undermine the validity of expert testimony during cross-examination. It is during cross-examination that the voice of law – with its fact-finding principles determining what counts as ‘evidence’ or ‘truth’ – and the voice of science – with its primary goal of discovering the truth – meet. In my talk, adopting a discourse-analytic perspective, I will explain how the troubled relationship between science and law becomes manifest during the cross-examination of two medical experts in a jury trial and how the two resist the narrative imposed by the opposing counsel. Using data from the California v. Murray trial, I will present the strategies identified in a corpus-assisted analysis of the trial transcripts (collocates of I, you and we) as well as those identified through a qualitative analysis of the trial videos, and I will demonstrate the role that these strategies play in the negotiation of the status of expert knowledge. As the analysis suggests, the counsel’s turns are characterized by the use of hypotheticals (would you expect) as well as reliance on negation to challenge the witness’s expertise (didn’t you?). The expert witnesses, on the other hand, use communication ver	courtroom interaction; expert testimony; expert witness; jury trial