- March 8, 2025
Paul Miller called 911 in March 2012 and told dispatchers he had shot his neighbor.
“He begged me to,” Miller said.
But Miller didn’t mean that the man, Dana Mulhall, literally begged to be shot, a linguist said in a report he prepared for Miller’s defense attorneys.
“Mr. Miller’s use of ‘begged’ is readily interpretable as a commonplace of nonstandard dialect,” the report, which was prepared by Ronald Butters, says. “His sentence, ‘He begged me to shoot him,’ translates as ‘his hostile actions caused me to shoot him.’”
Butters said in his report that the 911 call supports testimony Miller later gave, in which he said he shot Mulhall in self-defense. Moments before the shooting, the two argued over barking dogs. Miller said Mulhall was acting belligerently.
Miller’s attorney requested, at a pre-trial hearing in February, that the state fund a linguist to analyze Miller’s words, saying that because Miller was born in the back hills of Tennessee, his testimony might be misunderstood by jurors. Circuit Judge J. David Walsh approved the request, as well as up to $2,000 to pay for the report, but prosecutors will have a chance to review the report before it is used at trial.
Butter scrutinized five files, including Miller’s 911 call and his subsequent interviews with law enforcement. Most of the potential misunderstandings come from the 911 call. Butter said he found few instances in Miller’s interviews in which Miller’s Southern Midland dialect might cause problems.
However, in the introduction to his report, Butter also said the conditions were not ideal for analyzing Miller's speech thoroughly. Butter had limited ability to rewind the more than five hours of audio recordings, no transcripts of depositions and was told to limit his time on the project to 10 hours.
Much of Butter’s report focuses on the 911 call. At one point during that call, Miller told dispatch that Mulhall “jumped” on him before Miller shot. Butter said this is another area of possible misinterpretation. According to Butter, this phrase can indicate an attack that is simply verbal, as in the English idiom, “He jumped all over me.”
“Thus, Mr. Miller’s statement, ‘He jumped on me,’ would be consistent with an intent to convey the idea that Mr. Miller received both physical and verbal assault, not necessarily actual physical contact,” Butter said in his report.
When he called 911, Miller gave a profanity-laden account of what happened and couldn’t remember details such as whether he had unloaded the gun he used. Butter said this is indicative of a heightened emotional state “as one might expect to arise in the immediate aftermath of a situation of extreme anger or fear for his life.”
Miller told investigators that he shot Mulhall because he had threatened to hurt Miller and his dogs. Miller remembers Mulhall saying, “I’ve got a gun, too,” and reaching for his back pocket. That’s when Miller fired.
Mulhall was shot once and turned to run away, but Miller continued to shoot, according to court documents.
Miller’s trial was originally scheduled to start April 22, but citing “personal issues” at a pretrial hearing Wednesday, Walsh pushed the trial to May 20. The trial is expected to last two weeks.
BOX: From the hills of Tennessee
A linguist was hired to interpret Paul Miller's statements in the 911 call in March 2012, after Miller shot his neighbor, Dana Mulhall.
Miller: "He begged me to."
Interpreter: "His hostile actions caused me to shoot him."
Miller: "He jumped on me."
Interpreter: "He verbally assaulted me," as in, "He jumped all over me."
