Slang, Latin, Medical Terms, and a Jury Instruction
You are transcribing a felony jury trial in Tulsa County. The audio contains several passages that require judgment. A witness says: 'He was gonna cop a plea, but he don't want no trial.' Later, the prosecutor refers to a 'nunc pro tunc order' and the medical examiner says the victim suffered a 'myocardial infarction'; the audio is muddy on both terms, and 'infarction' sounds like 'infraction.' The judge reads a jury instruction: 'The defendant shall not be found guilty unless the State proves...' but the recording sounds like 'may.' Defense counsel asks you to clean up the witness's grammar and to correct the judge's instruction to match the written copy. You have the written jury instructions but not the medical examiner's report.
1. How should the witness's sentence be transcribed, and why?
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Transcribe the witness verbatim: 'He was gonna cop a plea, but he don't want no trial.' The reporter's job is to preserve the spoken record, not to improve the speaker's grammar or diction. Changing 'gonna' to 'going to,' 'don't' to 'doesn't,' or removing the double negative would alter the evidence and could affect how a reader assesses the witness's testimony. 'Cop a plea' is slang but it is intelligible and should remain. If the style manual permits expanding 'gonna' to 'going to,' that is a formatting convention, not a grammar correction; consistency matters more than elegance. I would not add '[sic]' to spoken testimony, because that device is generally used for errors in written exhibits or quoted documents. If a word is truly unintelligible, I use '[unintelligible]' or a bracketed phonetic guess and verify it, rather than silently substituting a polished word.
2. What should you do with 'nunc pro tunc' and 'myocardial infarction' when the audio is unclear?
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Use context and available verification, but do not guess silently. 'Nunc pro tunc' is a standard Latin legal phrase meaning 'now for then'; if the prosecutor clearly uses it in reference to a corrective order, the correct spelling is appropriate even if the audio is muddy. 'Myocardial infarction' is the correct medical term for a heart attack; 'infraction' is a different word and would change the meaning. If the medical examiner's pronunciation is unclear, I should check the audio again, consult the written exhibit if one exists, or ask for clarification at the next recess on the record. If I cannot verify before the transcript is due, I should use a bracketed phonetic rendering or '[unintelligible]' and flag it for verification rather than write a plausible but wrong term. The key distinction is between correcting an obvious transcription error and inventing a term the speaker may not have used.
3. How should you handle the judge's instruction 'shall' versus 'may'?
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Transcribe exactly what the judge says, and verify against the written instruction without silently conforming the record to the writing. 'Shall' and 'may' are legally different: one is mandatory, the other permissive, and a jury instruction read aloud becomes part of the record. If the audio is muddy and the written copy says 'shall,' I may use the written copy to resolve the ambiguity, but I should first listen carefully and, if a real conflict remains, note it rather than choose the more polished version. I should not 'correct' the judge's spoken words to match the written instruction merely because counsel asks. If the judge misspoke and later corrects the instruction on the record, I transcribe the correction. The certified transcript should reflect the actual proceedings, with any discrepancy preserved rather than erased.