The Oklahoma Bar Journal December 2024

E thics & P rofessional R esponsibility

‘During the Entire Proceedings’: The Ethics of Online Court Interpreting By Taylor Cozzens T HROUGHOUT MUCH OF THE 20TH CENTURY, court authorities in the United States addressed language barriers by grabbing the first bilingual (or marginally bilingual) per son available and asking for an interpretation of only the most salient portions of dialogue. 1 This practice denied linguistic minorities access to justice in two main ways: First, the people who acted as go-betweens – police officers, attorneys, court staff, family members – often lacked the linguistic skills or ethical acumen to do their job well; second, linguistic minorities usually received only partial or sporadic translations of court proceedings.

qualified interpreter. As they fur ther explained, Mr. Negron’s right to hear and question the English speaking witnesses against him “necessitated that he hear more than the babble of their voices.” 2 In 1974, the Arizona Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in State v. Natividad. In the original trial, a jury found José Natividad, a farmworker who was out of a job, guilty of transportation of mari juana and possession of the drug for sale. As in the Negrón case, how ever, the court used an interpreter mainly to question and prosecute Mr. Natividad but did not provide one to help him prepare his defense, consult attorneys or simply under stand what was going on. In his appeal, Mr. Natividad made a strong case for the right

to an interpreter throughout the entire proceedings. The justices of the Supreme Court concurred. In their words, a trial in which a defendant understood only a small fraction of the proceedings “comes close to being an invective against an insensible object, possibly infringing upon the accused’s basic ‘right to be present in the court room at every stage of his trial.’” 3 The Negrón and Natividad cases helped establish the stan dard of completeness for profes sional courtroom interpreting. In California, one of the first states to codify this standard, rules of the court indicate that “when inter preting for a party, the interpreter must interpret everything that is said during the entire proceedings .” 4 Only with such completeness can

This latter problem became the grounds for appeal in the 1970 case of Negrón v. State of New York . Three years earlier, a jury had convicted Rogelio Negrón, a Puerto Rican potato packer, of murder. The prob lem with the trial, however, was that Mr. Negrón spoke no English, and court authorities provided an interpreter only when they needed to interrogate him. For most of the trial, Mr. Negrón did not under stand what anyone was saying. Regardless of guilt, Mr. Negrón argued that the language barrier had undermined his right to partic ipate in his own defense. The judges who reviewed the trial agreed. For defendants with limited English, they ruled, the normal rights to con sult counsel and confront witnesses implied a “derivative right” to a

Statements or opinions expressed in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Oklahoma Bar Association, its officers, Board of Governors, Board of Editors or staff.

22 | DECEMBER 2024

THE OKLAHOMA BAR JOURNAL