Regina versus Neil Scobie

Abstract

Expert opinions in voice identification cases normally differ only in degrees of certainty. This case report examines factors that led opposing experts to reach unusually disparate opinions over how far the suspect's voice matched that of the accused in a hoax bomb call. Extrapolating from the details of the defence and the prosecution experts' analyses, the author argues that a narrowly phonetic approach to the problem of speaker identification can be misleading and that, as a general principle, phonetic data must be interpreted in the light of dialectological and sociolinguistic information.