Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases

Author: Robin Conley
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
ISBN: 9780199334162
Published In: December 2015
Format: Hardback
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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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.

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.

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 law.
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