Today’s Hampshire Gazette has a long report on last Friday’s Freeman lecture by John Rickford: “Justice for Jeantel (and Trayvon): Fighting Dialect Prejudice in Courtrooms and Beyond.”

Excerpt from the article by Michael Majchrowicz: “Jeantel’s testimony was crucial to the prosecution, according to Stanford linguistics expert John Rickford, because it was as close as jurors were going to get to ever actually hearing from Martin. The then -19-year-old’s testimony became a lightning rod for ridicule and harassment because of the way she spoke. Critics called her testimony unintelligible. Others said the hard-to-understand testimony was indicative of a lack of intelligence and that she lacked credibility as a witness. Rickford told an auditorium of roughly 200 attendees Friday at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Freeman Lecture for Linguistics that these criticisms shone a light on a major problem of the criminal justice system: Perpetuating prejudice against African-American English dialects.”