Forensic Psychology For Dummies (53 page)
Read Forensic Psychology For Dummies Online
Authors: David Canter
A suicide note declaring the reasons for the person taking their own life counts as valuable evidence if found with a dead body. It can help to show what the person was thinking and feeling and possibly indicating that no other accomplices were involved in the crime. A suicide note is an invaluable record of the state of mind of the person immediately before they took their life, or even a record of what other people were thinking or saying. The genuineness of the note needs to be considered, not just whether the victim wrote it but whether the note does indicate they intended to take their own life. There are cases in which a suicide note was found but the Coroner (who deals with the cause of death) decided the person did not commit suicide.
Many other types of crime can involve the offender leaving a written record of his actions and intentions. Stalking is one, in which offensive letters can play an important part in documenting the crime. Another is business fraud where correspondence shows who the persons involved were or how the offender was distorting crucial documents.
In all these cases the authorship and genuiness of the document has to be established. It’s not unknown for people to write offence letters to themselves or to invent a correspondence to imply they’re being stalked.
Give-away words
In one criminal case, an anonymous incriminating diary was compared to the known writing of a suspect. The prosecution claim was that the diary was written by the suspect and therefore the incriminating evidence in it showed he was guilty of the crime. This claim was supported by a linguist who drew attention to a number of misspellings that were found in both documents (for example, ‘breath’ instead of ‘breathe’, and ‘its’ instead of ‘it’s’). These misspellings were consistent with how the words are pronounced. A number of profanities were common to both sets of text, such as ‘ass’, ‘butthole’ and ‘screwed’, as well as further similarities in the way time was recorded and how the writer expressed his emotions. The linguist used these comparisons to propose that the two sets of writing came from the same author.
But even with such glaring examples, the forensic psychologist challenged the possibility that the misspellings and other features were definitive signs of the documents being written by the same author. For example, most people in the suspect’s circle often misspelled ‘breathe’ and ‘it’s’ and the profanities were common words in their vocabulary. Without knowing how widespread the suspect’s way of expressing himself was and if it was common to the community in which he lived and worked, the forensic psychologist argued that such matches can be taken only as a useful indicator and not as hard proof that the documents were by the same person.
Entering the world of document experts
The psychological examination of a document by a forensic psychologist is rather different from many other ways in which documents can be examined. The forensic psychologist focuses on the meanings of the document and what is known about lying and the indicators of truthfulness. But there are other ways of determining if a document is genuine that use very different sorts of knowledge and skills. Police investigators draw on these to help them in their task.
Linguists
Linguists
are experts in how language is shaped and being used. They can comment on the usual or particular meaning and usage of the words. For example, they can advise whether the person who received the document could reasonably be expected to regard it as a genuine threat. That is important because the law requires the victim to experience the threat if it’s to be considered a crime. Or, in the case of a trademark dispute, whether the text in the branding is making claims that people will assume to be indicating something, but that what it indicates can be shown to be false or dishonest. The dispute here is over what the words mean in common use.
Psycholinguists
overlap with (and sometimes challenge the conclusions of) linguists. This is a distinct branch of psychology that is only rarely to do with anything criminal or illegal. A psycholinguist is concerned with the relation of the words to what’s going on in a person’s mind. In some cases the psycholinguist explores the idiosyncrasies of the way a person is expressing what he’s saying. Forensic psychologists can draw on psycholinguistics to challenge the linguist, who looks at language in general. I give an example in the nearby sidebar ‘Give-away words’.
If the way a person writes is influenced by his education and upbringing and the community in which he lives, the way he expresses himself in writing will not be entirely distinct for any individual. For writing to make sense it must draw on what people in that culture understand. So there will always be aspects of writing that are common to people in the same sub-group and possibly some aspects that are distinct for that person.