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, the book explores how language, including written laws and trial talk, affects jurors' death penalty decisions. By focusing on how language can both facilitate and stymie empathic encounters, Conley investigates theinterface between experiential and linguistic aspects of legal-decision making to address the moral conflict faced by jurors that is inherent to death penalty trials.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- 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 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
