The multilingual landscape continues to expand in social and business sectors, but in the judicial arena, it is still an uncomfortable fit. Interpreters are a relatively new fixture in American courts. Judges and trial attorneys spend enormous energy sharpening their use of language, but most consider interpreters too blunt an instrument to accurately convey their exact intent across language barriers. Parties to the litigation harbor similar concerns about their accessibility to the proceedings when language passes through what they consider an interpreter’s sieve. For example, at the onset of the Nuremberg trials following World War II, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring famously responded, after being asked if he wanted counsel to represent him against charges of war crimes, “Of course, I want counsel. But it is even more important to have a good interpreter.”

Interpreters often provide non–English speakers their only access to court proceedings. Equally important, they provide the court with its only access to non-English-speaking defendants and witnesses. This Comment addresses one particular class of non–English speakers: deaf adults who are called to testify as witnesses in civil or criminal court but who lack both spoken and sign language proficiency. Michele LaVigne and McCay Vernon write that although many deaf adults succeed as doctors, lawyers, stay-at-home moms, and factory workers, the confluence of a restrictive environment, a poor or failed attempt at education, and sometimes other biological limitations deprives some deaf people of the opportunity to acquire a language foundation in either English or sign language. These semilingual or nonlingual deaf adults are often termed as having Minimal Language Skills (MLS). Generally, these individuals are highly visually oriented, low functioning, functionally illiterate, and uneducated; they often go through life using tidbits of the majority language (whether it is English or American Sign Language) and systems of gesture.

How should a court accommodate this type of witness? Many court practices grew out of how the courts learned to deal with MLS deaf defendants in the criminal system. The case of Donald Lang, a deaf man accused of two murders in Chicago, is a well-publicized example of courts wrestling with this issue. Lang came from a poor black neighborhood in Chicago, never attended school, and never learned even a first language. Despite having what could have been the best attorney-defendant fit in lawyer Lowell Myers, who was himself deaf, Lang’s situation confounded the Illinois system. In no fewer than nine reported decisions, the courts wrestled with how to accommodate Lang. The crux of the issue was whether Lang was unfit to stand trial because he was linguistically incompetent and therefore unable to assist in his own defense. As a result, Lang fought for years against indefinite confinement in a mental institution despite his lack of any mental illness. In a similar case, the Louisiana Supreme Court approved of the involuntary commitment of James Williams, also deaf and nonlingual, without a trial because he lacked the ability to effectively communicate. These are not merely the results of yesteryear’s application of justice; courts continue to wrestle with deaf semilingual or nonlingual adults’ linguistic incompetency today.