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Confronting the Death Penalty

How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases

Robin Conley Riner

Publication Date - 01 November 2020

ISBN: 9780197545546

256 pages
Paperback
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches

In Stock

This book breaks new ground in studies of law and language, language and psychology, and the death penalty.

Description

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.

Features

  • Examines actual jurors' experiences serving on death penalty trials
  • Considers together the specific communicative strategies used in trials with those used by jurors when reflecting on their decisions
  • Introduces a unique fusion of these compelling topics, using death penalty trials as an ethnographic case to illustrate the violent potential of legal language
  • Provides an ethnographic approach to Texas death penalty trials

About the Author(s)

Robin Conley Riner is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Marshall University.

Reviews

"Dr Riner's approach is a unique one that makes for a compelling read ... a lucid exposition of the contradictions and fallacies that capital jurors must wrestle with in their role within the American criminal justice system ... Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases would be an asset to the collection of any academic law library, as well as to legal practitioners searching for a deeper understanding of the link between language and the legal practice." -- Erica Friesen, Canadian Law Library Review

"There is no doubt that profound lessons from this book can shed new light on the implementation and management of capital pubishment in America." -- Zhonghua Wu, Journal of Language and Politics

Table of Contents

    1 Introduction: "That's the hardest thing I've ever had to do"

    2 Doing Death in Texas: Studying jurors in "the death penalty state"

    3 "I hope I'm strong enough to follow the law": Emotion and objectivity in capital jurors' decisions

    4 Facing death: Empathy, emotion and embodied actions in jurors' decisions

    5 Linguistic distance and the dehumanization of capital defendants

    6 Agents of the state: Capital jurors' accountability for their sentencing decisions

    7 Conclusions: Linguistic dehumanization and democracy

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