In Courtroom Talk and Neocolonial Control, Diana Eades gives us a detailed and important description of the lingering implications of colonialism as they are apparent in legal language ideology. In an analysis of a Queensland, Australia case involving the police harassment of Aboriginal youths, the Pinkenba case, Eades describes how language is caught up in and affected by social macro-structures, and how courtroom talk has social consequences. In doing so, this book brings together critical sociolinguistics, forensic sociolinguistics, and race, ethnicity, and intercultural studies. For Eades, “a critical sociolinguistic exploration of this case sheds light on … how the criminal justice system fails to deliver justice,” and reveals “the workings of the control which has been exercised by the state over Aboriginal people for more than two hundred years” (p. 3). Eades explores the Pinkenba case as a recent episode in a long history of forced removal and relocation of Aboriginal people, especially children. Working as it does between sociolegal studies and critical sociolinguistics, some arguments and chapters of the book will seem more relevant to sociolinguists than others, and the same goes for sociolegal scholars. Recognizing this, Eades provides a key to the book (26–27) that guides both audiences to the sections that they will find the most useful.
Because the book's argument is grounded in the Pinkenba case, it will be useful briefly to overview its details. Late one night in May 1994, three Aboriginal boys, ages 12, 13, and 14, were in a shopping mall in Brisbane, where they were approached by six armed police officers. They were put into separate police cars and taken 14 kilometers out of town to Pinkenba, a “swampy industrial wasteland,” where they were threatened and left to find their own way home (1). The Criminal Justice Commission investigated, found that the police had no legal reason to remove the boys, and charged them with unlawful deprivation of liberty. However, the magistrate court that heard the case decided that the boys willingly got into the cars and found the police innocent. A central goal of the book is to understand how the legal linguistic mechanisms used in the questioning of the boys facilitated the court's conclusion.
Eades uses chap. 2 to situate this “micro-event” within the “macro-structure” of neocolonialism, which includes a history of over-policing Aboriginal people, the criminalization of offensive language, and spreading moral panic about crime and Aboriginal young people. Using examples from Eades's own fieldwork and government, nongovernmental, and international reports, chap. 3 details the relationship among moral panic, the criminalization of offensive language, over-policing, and police harassment and violence.
The second section of the book begins the close analyses of the in-court cross-examination of the boys. Eades, who worked as a consultant on the Pinkenba case, grounds this analysis in her research on the differences between Aboriginal English and Standard English in legal settings (cf. Eades Reference Eades1992). Based on individual and group interviews, she finds that the “boys had had little chance to develop bicultural competence,” and thus “that they were using Aboriginal ways of communicating, which involve significant cultural differences from mainstream English and which disadvantaged them in the interview situation” (16). Before the hearing began, she provided the court with a report that included a list of guidelines to use in direct and cross-examination: “avoid ‘big words’”; “ask questions with a simple structure, questioning only proposition at a time”; “wherever possible minimise the risk of gratuitous concurrence”; “avoid long strings of Yes-No questions” (19). At the hearing, she was shocked to find that these recommendations were being exploited “to distort the boys' testimony and to show them as untrustworthy and unreliable witnesses” (19).
In section three, Eades shows how the effects of courtroom talk naturalized the boys as criminals rather than victims of police harassment and violence; she devotes one chapter to the cross-examination of each boy. Chap. 7 focuses on David, who was made to look as though he had “absolutely no regard whatsoever for law and order” (179), with the use of gratuitous concurrence and strings of yes/no questions. Chap. 8 focuses on Albert, whom the Defense Counsel (DC) pigeonholed as a liar and “a big criminal” (208) by shouting, asking questions involving multiple propositions, and asking the same question over and over. Chap. 9 focuses on Barry, whose prior criminal activity is used to make him seem untrustworthy. He is also bullied with questions such as this one: “Can you understand the distinction between a guttural yes and a guttural no?” (241). As the oldest boy, he is the most resistant to such question-asking strategies, responding, “No need to yell at me I'm not a dog” (241). Nevertheless, by using questions involving multiple propositions and leading yes/no questions, the DC successfully defines him as a criminal.
In chap. 10, Eades shows that the exploitation of language variables described above is successful, because with it, the DCs are able to obscure the boys' victimhood by constructing them as “lying criminals, who are a danger on the streets” (147). “This identity work … unmistakably relates to a moral panic about Aboriginal young people” (147). Eades thus shows the limits of the argument that “speakers perform their own identity” (Bucholtz & Hall Reference Bucholtz, Hall and Duranti2004, Holmes & Meyerhoff Reference Holmes and Meyerhoff2003), finding that this view can't account for legal situations in which speakers' agency to construct their own identity is constrained by external factors (149–50). Linguistic mechanisms used by the defense, such as pseudo-declarative questions, limited the identity positions open to the boys (152–53), by presupposing that the boys were criminals. For example, the question “It's not a bad place to- steal some money is it from someone?” (153) presupposes that the person giving the answer has considered stealing money, and in answering either yes or no, the person consents to the presupposition. At other times the DCs entextualized minor inconsistencies between the boys' stories as lies. Eades argues that such discursive strategies developed a feeling that the boys were career criminals who “had no fear of the police” (269), an assumption that is reiterated in local newspapers, feeding back into local moral panic (279–82).
In chap. 11, Eades ironically points out that “the ‘success’ of the Pinkenba case can perhaps be seen in the fact that there has been no conviction of a police officer for abuse of an Aboriginal person since the case” (291). Nevertheless, some changes have been made to the criminal justice system in Queensland since the Pinkenba case, such as the introduction of the Murri Court, which includes the participation of indigenous elders, who consult regarding cultural issues, language and pragmatic language issues, and appropriate sentencing. The Evidence Act was also changed to recognize that children are especially vulnerable to authority and must be questioned differently.
Eades concludes the book with a chapter that puts the Pinkenba finding – that the boys willingly got into the police vehicles – in an interesting discussion of consent, drawing parallels with literature on rape. She argues that by discursively constructing the boys as intentional criminals who did not fear police and who did not “protest” (271), the defense was able to argue successfully that the boys knowingly consented to getting into the police vehicles. Eades argues that in fact, the power wielded by the police, developed over two centuries of colonial control, made it impossible for the boys to say no to six armed police officers. The boys' forced consent to go with the police was reiterated in court with gratuitous concurrence and pseudo-declarative question-asking strategies (311). Such discursive strategies required the boys to give answers in consensus with the defense counsel, regardless of how they understood the question or what they saw as the real answer to the question. According to Eades, these question-asking strategies are facilitated by twelve “problematic assumptions about the ways in which language works,” such as the disregard of social context, the manipulation and decontextualization of witness language, and a misunderstanding of children's and teens' speech (330–31).
The story that Eades tells is compelling. By carefully unpacking the speech patterns of the boys, the questioning strategies of the defense counsel, and the historical context of the event, she leaves no question whether the boys were victimized by the police or whether the legal system participated in that victimization. With its close attention to linguistic, social, and historical detail, this book makes an important contribution to sociolinguistics, sociolegal studies, and critical race studies. By showing the depths to which institutions and ideologies of language are indebted to social and political forces, Eades reveals the depths to which institutionalized language ideologies can affect speakers' agency.
