Legal process, whether civil or criminal, depends heavily on the medium of language. It is the glue that runs through all of legal process, the medium of all interactive communication prior to, during, and after trial process. In criminal law, it is also the spoken medium of police investigations, prisons, and consultations among lawyers and between lawyers and their clients. It is also the medium through which the innocent are sometimes convicted of crimes that they did not, in fact, commit. Creating language crimes explores the use of conversational strategies by cooperating witnesses, by law enforcement officers, and as trial evidence in a book that will serve to introduce many to the goals and methods of forensic linguistics in the criminal context, as well as to the specific conversational strategies sometimes used to convict innocent individuals.

By presenting a number of detailed case analyses, Shuy illustrates vividly and explicitly the nature and function of discourse strategies for manipulating language in order to create an impression of guilt or even to elicit a false confession. The author provides excerpts from transcripts so that readers can analyze relevant data themselves. Such data will be very helpful for all readers, but especially for professors and students. Overall, the book should interest defense lawyers and judges as well as linguists and linguistic students – and also interested citizens. Shuy has consulted or testified in more than 500 criminal cases, and his book makes available to readers his best criminal experience in the rapidly emerging field of forensic linguistics.

The book contains an Introduction and four parts. Language crimes are defined and described in the Introduction, and Part I introduces details of the subject matter by focusing on conversational strategies. Its three chapters explain how language crimes are created, which conversational strategies are used in their creation, and the potential power of such strategies.

Part II details ways in which conversational strategies are used in surreptitiously recorded conversation by cooperating witnesses engaged in undercover operations. Strategies discussed and illustrated include interrupting, overlapping, being deliberately ambiguous, refusing to accept “no” as an answer, scripting conversation by using directives and apologies, lying, withholding information, and providing irrelevant but apparently damaging information. Among the cases discussed is Texas v. T. Cullen Davis, the first legal case that Shuy was involved with. The various strategies are discussed and illustrated in eight chapters, each of which focuses on a particular strategy or set of strategies in one or more particular cases.

Part III also discusses the use of conversational strategies, but it focuses on their use by law enforcement officers as they interview targets, sometimes recording those interviews, sometimes preparing written reports of statements made. The latter can sometimes be shown to contain altered or even fabricated information.

Part IV constitutes both an overview of all previously discussed strategies and an exploration of such questions as “the extent to which the strategies are used, why they are so powerful, and what can and cannot be done about such evidence” (p. 165). Its one chapter poses for discussion eight questions, then offers brief but explicit answers based on the author's experiences. The eight questions are about whether cooperating witnesses and law enforcement officers use the same strategies, why those strategies are so powerful, why their use often does not arouse suspicion, and what linguists can offer in situations where such strategies have been used.

Throughout his book, Shuy is careful to distinguish what linguists can do from what they cannot do. In the final chapter, for instance, he discusses limitations on the extent to which linguists can assist in identifying lying and deception. He also discusses the interesting question of why prosecutors make less use of forensic linguists than defense lawyers do.

The style of this book, like that of Shuy's earlier books on the role of language in judicial process (1993, 1998a, 1998b, 2002), is informal and is therefore accessible for all interested readers. Some readers may wish for more scholarly apparatus (citations to legal opinions and law review articles, in particular), but some references and cases are cited.

Overall, this book constitutes a significant contribution to the rapidly growing and expanding field of forensic linguistics. It is also a text that is highly accessible for students, who have demonstrated increasing interest in the field in recent years. It is definitely a must for the library of any serious forensic linguist, and it is a useful tool for getting acquainted with an area many find unfamiliar or intimidating.