La Gabacha Esa
13 Years Experience
Borderlands, US
Female, 37
I interpret for people who speak only or primarily Spanish who come into contact with the justice system as case participants defendants, witnesses, or family members. I have 10 years of experience in state and federal courts, freelance and staff, in the Northeast and Southwest, and also teach and train court interpreters and am active in our local and national professional associations.
It's been fun for me, too. I do a lot of trainings and info sessions for people who are getting into the field, but I rarely get to hear questions from "outsiders," so to speak. Thanks! I should mention that overall, I do really believe in our justice system. It gets a bad rap, but if you're in it day in and day out, it mostly works the way it's supposed to. So actually, the only *criminal* case that comes to mind is one where I honestly felt that the defendant was innocent but the jury found him guilty, and in that case the judge ended up entering what's called a "judgment notwithstanding the verdict"--basically acquitted him despite the verdict. (If you're wondering, it's *very* rare for that to happen, and it can't happen in reverse--if the jury acquits, the judge can't convict anyway.) But actually the most heartbreaking cases are always the ones involving children, especially abuse and neglect cases. I spent a long time working in a family court system that presumptively removed all children where abuse was considered a possibility (basically, guilty until proven innocent). The ones that have been hardest for me have been ones where the parents actually were innocent (probably because (1) if they weren't, then the system was working as it should and (2) I rarely ever saw the children themselves). The worst was a newborn removed from her very young, very distraught parents because she had 3 major broken bones in her first month of life ... and it took 90 days of lost parent-child bonding time for the initial diagnosis of brittle bone disease to be confirmed (that is, the doctors suspected brittle bone rather than abuse from the start, but the baby was *still* taken from her parents, who were only allowed to see her with close supervision while the testing was carried out). That's probably the hardest case I've ever done, and while we mostly rotate so it's rare for a case to only ever be handled by one interpreter, I did happen to be there for almost all of their hearings (including the 6-month and 12-month follow-ups), which is probably why it sticks with me.
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Yes and no. Yes, because everyone makes mistakes and sometimes one word can have a huge impact in ways you can't foresee. No, because part of the job is owning up to your mistakes ASAP. I have had to correct the record in front of the jury or in a transcript before, but as far I know none of my mistakes has ever gone to the judge/jury with the error uncorrected.
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Now there's a dangerous question to ask a Spanish interpreter, especially a federal one. In general, the more people you know in a given situation, the more sympathetic you are to their situation. So yes, working on a daily basis with people whose children are starving to death or whose spouses are dying of cancer because there's no work in Mexico or because their store was burned down and brother murdered because they couldn't come up with a big enough bribe to the local cartel does change one's perspective. I'll skip the entire lecture, but the two main points are that (1) I'm far from convinced that illegal immigration is actually doing more harm than good to this country, either economically or in any other way, once you balance all the benefits against the negatives; and (2) trying to stop it by the current policies is a lot like trying to cure a brain tumor by giving the patient ibuprofen--you may manage to reduce the symptoms a little, but there's no way in heck it's going to get anything but worse unless you actually address the problem itself--the reason that people are choosing to leave their home, their families, everything they've ever known and loved to come here and live in fear and be treated like **** for wages most teenagers wouldn't accept. Also, I think most of this country either never studied US history or finds it more convenient to forget that their forebears from Ireland, Italy, China, Germany, and so forth were looked upon just the same way that today they're looking at Mexicans.
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Roughly equal, although most of my cases are immigration-related so obviously it's rare for a native English speaker to have that type of charge. Equal access is what interpreters are trying to achieve and I think we mostly more or less do. Studies have shown that testimony is usually considered a bit more credible when delivered without an accent (so testifying through an interpreter instead of in heavily accented English) but the content and demeanor is far more important. That's the only major difference and it's between using/not using an interpreter, not LEP[limited English proficient] and native speakers. Some potential jurors hate when people use interpreters, but the court tries to weed them out.
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Well, to be a judge, you have to be a lawyer first, so that knocks "judge" off the list of career paths for me. I don't have the patience for legal research that lawyers need. In my job, the research is presented to me (well, to the judge, but I get to see it) already done, and I just read it. Finding the caselaw I need would drive me crazy. Also, law school is really expensive, and lawyers (at least the ones who work in criminal justice) work really grueling hours, whereas my job is mostly 40-hours-a-week.
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Well, two main reasons: first, most state constitutions require the record to be kept in English. Mine is the only exception I know of--if the judge, defendant, both lawyers, the. Probation officer, and court reporter all speak Spanish [or any other language] then the hearing can be held in that language. Second, most lawyers/judges who claim to speak Spanish, don't (most of them learned at home as children but never studied it formally). At least, not the highly educated legalese they'd need. I work with a lot of "bilingual" attorneys (at least half the ones I work with regularly) and at least half of them speak enough to vacation in Costa Rica without difficulty (the other half can just about order a beer and enchiladas), but maybe half of those speak it the way someone who'd studied law in Mexico does--because of course they haven't. They study American law. We study linguistics and comparative international law. And to hear a casse in Spanish, everyone would need to be thinking American legal argument *and* figuring out how to explain it in Spanish at the same time. Also, judges have to be assigned to cases at random, so you couldn't give all the Spanish speakers to the same judge.
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Actually, there was a case earlier this year in Toronto, Ontario, in which a mistrial was declared due to errors in the interpretation from Hindi to English, on the grounds that the defendant had effectively been prevented from being present at his own trial. But that's pretty rare (both in Canada and in the US). Most caselaw relates to the interpreter's qualifications or lack thereof, not to problems with the interpretation per se, and any errors in interpreting have to be pervasive--one error (even a major one) has never caused a reversal that I know of; it's being consistently bad throughout the whole proceeding that *can* lead to a reversal. But most appeals on the grounds of interpreting error, fail, for several reasons. 1. It can be hard to prove because interpreter renditions aren't usually recorded. 2. In most situations, if an error is not objected to on the spot, it cannot be objected to later (that goes for all sorts of errors, not just interpreter errors). 3. In the case of an error in the interpretation of witness testimony, usually if the evidence is so overwhelming in one direction or another that the result would be the same without that witness's testimony, the decision is allowed to stand. I believe the overall trend is that it is slowly becoming more common for appeals to be granted based on interpreting errors, but the most recent caselaw I can find written evidence of, dates from about 2000. I've been to conferences more recently where this issue is discussed, though, and that's been my impression.
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