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Living with the decision that someone will die: Linguistic distance and empathy in jurors' death penalty decisions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

Robin Conley
Robin Conley*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Marshall University, One John Marshall Drive, Huntington, WV 25755-2678, [email protected]
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Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Texas death penalty trials, this article explores how language helps to make death penalty decisions possible—how specific communicative choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. By analyzing postverdict interviews with jurors, trial language, and written legal language, I examine a variety of communicative practices through which defendants are dehumanized and thus considered deserving of death. This dehumanization is made possible through the physical and linguistic management of distance, which enables jurors to deny empathy with defendants and, in turn, justify their sentencing decisions. In addition, the article probes how jurors' linguistic choices can create distance between themselves and the reality of their decisions, further facilitating death sentences. (Law, empathy, deixis, agency, dehumanization, linguistic distance)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , November 2013 , pp. 503 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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