Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases
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| Anteprima |
Confronting
the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases
probes how jurors make the ultimate decision about whether another human
being should live or die. Drawing on ethnographic and qualitative
linguistic methods, this book explores the means through which language
helps to make death penalty decisions possible - how specific linguistic
choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions
and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. The
analysis draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in diverse
counties across Texas, including participant observation in four capital
trials and post-verdict interviews with the jurors who decided those
cases. Given the impossibility of access to actual capital jury
deliberations, this integration of methods aims to provide the clearest
possible window into jurors' decision-making. Using methods from
linguistic anthropology, conversation analysis, and multi-modal
discourse analysis, Conley analyzes interviews, trial talk, and written
legal language to reveal a variety of communicative practices through
which jurors dehumanize defendants and thus judge them to be deserving
of death. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie
empathic encounters, the book addresses a conflict inherent to death
penalty trials: jurors literally face defendants during trial and then
must distort, diminish, or negate these face-to-face interactions in
order to sentence those same defendants to death. The book reveals that
jurors cite legal ideologies of rational, dispassionate decision-making -
conveyed in the form of authoritative legal language - when negotiating
these moral conflicts. By investigating the interface between
experiential and linguistic aspects of legal decision-making, the book
breaks new ground in studies of law and language, language and
psychology, and the death penalty.
