Jessica Kalbfeld

Taylor Jones and Christopher Hall of CulturePoint spoke to NBC News’s THINK about Testifying While Black. Posted July 1, 2019.

“Court Reporters May Be Writing Down Black People's Testimonies Wrong.” by Leila Ettachfini. Vice Media. May 23, 2019.

“African American English often misunderstood in court.” by Jeff Glorfeld. Cosmos Magazine. May 27, 2019.

“Black Kos, Tuesday's Chile. Testifying while Black.” Daily KOS. May 28, 2019.

Bustle wrote about the criminalization of AAE in relation to the new documentary “When They See Us” and spoke to co-author Taylor Jones about findings from the court reporters study.

“Speaking Black Dialect in Courtrooms Can Have Striking Consequences.” by John Eligon. New York Times. Jan 25,2019.

The article by John Eligon was also in the print edition, Sunday Times on Jan 27, 2019, page A21 under the headline “When Justice is Deaf to How Some Black People Talk.”

“Are Philly court reporters accurate with black dialect? Study: not really.” by Cassie Owens. Philadelphia Inquirer. January 22, 2019.

Coverage of the court reporters project is at the top of The Sentencing Project’s Race and Justice News monthly electronic newsletter for March 4, 2019.

Co-author Taylor Jones was on Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane on WHYY this morning speaking about our court reporter research with Cassie Owens, who covered our research in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Kami Chavis, Professor of law and Director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest School of Law. Listen here.

Deray McKesson, Clint Smith III, Brittany Packnett, and Sam Sinyangwe discussed the research on Pod Save the People. The segment starts 11 minutes and 58 seconds into the episode. Take a listen.

One of my co-authors, Taylor Jones, spoke to Carol Off on CBC Radio One’s As It Happens about our court reporter research. Read the transcript and hear the audio of his interview.

On March 7, Blavity wrote about the study based on the transcript of the As It Happens interview.

Language Magazine published an article about the findings from the study at the beginning of April.

The court reporters study was mentioned in The Hill’s Morning Report on January 28, 2019. It’s towards the bottom under Criminal justice and linguistics.

John McWhorter wrote about the court reporter study in an article in The Atlantic.

Essence.com mentioned the study on January 29, 2018, in an article by Tanya Christian. Although, I should note, they misquote the statistics a bit — they said that court reporters in our study only transcribed accurately 40% of the time when in fact it is the opposite. They transcribed accurately about 60% of the time and inaccurately about 40% of the time (these stats are when counting by sentence not by word - they were accurate about 83% of the time when you do a word error rate, which is how their certifications are scored, so the 83% is the best stat to compare to their 95% accuracy requirements in order to be as fair as possible).

Court Scribes, a court reporting agency, has written about the court reporters research on their website.

U.S. News & World Report has picked up Cassie Owens’ story from the Philadelphia Inquirer. This article has since also been picked up by the Associated Press, and the story has been published, via the AP news service, in the following local newspapers: the Pittsburgh-Tribune Review, the Herald-Standard, the Roanoke Times, the Clay-Center Dispatch, the Courier Express, the Bristol Herald Courier, the Richmond Times Dispatch, the Dothan Eagle, the Standard-Journal, the Bradford Era, the Morning Times, and The Eagle.

The study has even been covered in Belgium!

Stefan Roots wrote about the court reporter research on his blog, Chester Matters Blog. I’d argue with his title a bit. He called the blog piece “Black People Talk Differently in the Court Room." Yes and no. Not all Black people speak AAE and not all speakers of AAE are Black. So more accurately it should be “the way some Black people speak in the court room …”.

The Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School talked to Jacob Faber and included our complaints article in their Journalists Resource Newsletter about covering protests against police violence.