Get the latest tech news
Forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases
How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.
The Jacobs’ lawyers dismissed the previous stylometric analysis as “completely ridiculous” and a “pseudo expertise.” The general prosecutor at the Court of Appeal of Dijon, Philippe Astruc, declined to comment for this piece on the techniques currently being used in the investigation but in a recent interview with radio station RTL he cautioned: “To imagine that it will suddenly be settled with a single report is an illusion.” Meanwhile, FBI linguist James Fitzgerald and sociolinguist Roger Shuy, who had been studying the bomber’s letters, had identified patterns in his language that helped narrow the list of suspects: Spellings such as “wilfully” for “willfully” and “clew” for “clue” pointed to someone from the Chicago area, for example. Eventually, the linguistic evidence was strong enough to issue a search warrant for the home of a reclusive mathematician named Theodore Kaczynski, raised in Chicago but living in rural Montana, where investigators found copies of the manifesto and homemade bombs.
Or read this on Hacker News
