upper hand in the assessment of mental capacity for persons who come before the CoP, it is the discipline of psychiatry, which dominates expert witness testimony in these proceedings.
#Warning label expert witness Pc
View full-textĪ finding that ‘P’ (as the person who is subject to Court of Protection proceedings is known) lacks mental capacity is the trigger for exposing them to decision-making by others and the powers of the Court of Protection (CoP) which, in the words of Justice Hedley, can be ‘invasive and draconian’ (Hedley J in PC v City of York Council cited in EWCA Civ 478 ). Despite such reservations, courts generally recognize that there is a place for linguistic expertise in appropriate cases. Reasons for judicial reluctance to admit linguistic expertise include concerns that it is not sufficiently reliable, the belief that issues like the meaning of a text can just as well be decided by a jury, and sometimes even institutional and political considerations. In other areas the admissibility of linguistic testimony has been more controversial, including author and speaker identification, discourse analysis, the meaning of legal texts, and the comprehensibility of jury instructions. a particular defendant understood the Miranda warning, and the phonetic similarity of two competing trademarks. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. To remedy such a situation, I suggest that (1) certain procedures be followed in preparing the English transcription for court use, and (2) courts use an expert witness in cases involving Chinese whenever possible. Because of the power of the framework within which we process incoming data and the lack of such a framework for key players in the US court system, it is easy for them to misinterpret the meaning of what was actually said in the conversation in Chinese. I argue that, due to the close link between the culture and society in which a language is used, the understanding of Chinese inevitably involves a certain degree of knowledge about the Chinese culture and society.
The first two are linguistic, while the third one is basically a feature associated with cultural knowledge.
tense, and the use of obscene language and kinship terms. I focus on three features that were neglected by English-speaking people dealing with legal cases involving Chinese: polysemy. social and cultural factors associated with Chinese are often neglected in the legal setting where 'the evidence' is language and 'language only' and (3) special problems due to the use of Chinese as evidence in court are yet to be realized by judges, jurors and lawyers. Findings from my analysis suggest that: (1) overlooking certain linguistic features in Chinese when translating can lead to questions about the credibility of evidence used in court (2). Based on actual court cases involving Chinese tapes surreptitiously recorded by the US government, I examined the complications in using Chinese as evidence in court where English has the institutionalized power.
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