Beyond “I Didn’t Do It”: A Linguistic Analysis of Denial in US Legal Settings

This paper investigates the multimodal manifestations of denial in US legal contexts, in the English language, by analyzing police interviews and cross-examinations. The research uses a 13-h corpus of video recordings portraying five male suspects, aged 20–44, eventually charged and convicted of femicide. We deploy techniques from conversation analysis, multimodal analysis, and speech processing, using tools like ELAN, Praat, WebMAUS, and Python libraries to transcribe, annotate, and analyze audio–video data. This exploratory study identifies several recurring patterns in prosodic and gestural cues associated with denial. In particular, our results indicate a prototypical multimodal denial characterized by a predominant gestural component: head positioning (neutral or lowered) and head shaking. This gestural expression is frequently repeated and can also function independently as a nonverbal marker of denial. Denial is also often accompanied by open-hand gestures, sitting upright posture, and a certain degree of vagueness in speech. Furthermore, our findings suggest that the expression of denial often involves a reduction in pitch and intensity following the confession or indictment. The analysis of pauses before denial instances reveals that a greater number of pauses typically occurs after incrimination. Overall, this study shows that there is an interesting interplay between verbal and nonverbal features of denial in legal interactions, underscoring the need for further analysis.