What's in the Box? Punishment and Insanity in the Canadian Jury Deliberation Room

In insanity cases, although the defendant's eventual punishment is legally irrelevant to the jury's decision, it may be psychologically relevant. In this three-part mixed-methods study, Canadian jury eligible participants (N = 83) read a fictional murder case involving an insanity claim, then took part in 45-min deliberations. Findings showed that mock jurors who were generally favourable towards punishment had a lower frequency of utterances that supported the Defence's case. A qualitative description of keyword flagged utterances also demonstrated that mock jurors relied on moral intuitions about authority, harm, and fairness in justifying their positions. These findings may have application in crafting effective Judge's instructions and lawyer's opening statements.

Is courtroom discourse an ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ register? The importance of sub-register

By applying Multi-Dimensional Analysis, this study has provided a thorough description of the lexico-grammatical characteristics of courtroom discourse to see to what extent it employs both linguistic features of oral registers and literate registers. In particular, this study focuses on language used in the four public sub-registers (opening statements, direct examinations, cross-examinations, closing arguments) of courtroom discourse and analyzes how oral/literate each sub-register is, instead of characterizing courtroom discourse as oral/literate overall. Detailed interpretation of results focuses on Dimension 1 (involved and interactive vs. informational production) and 2 (narrative vs. non-narrative discourse) as these two dimensions are identified as universal parameters of register variation (Biber, 2014). A corpus of high-profile courtroom trials was compiled for this study that includes the O. J. Simpson criminal trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial, and the Oklahoma bombing trial.

Objection!

This chapter stems from Seneca the Elder’s dedication of the Controversiae to both his sons and the ‘people’: the double audience implied by these opening statements extends throughout the compilation, resulting in an unstable ‘centre’ of attention. It demonstrates how declaimers are interrupted and critiqued in Seneca’s retellings, and highlights the ways in which these objections redirect attention from the speaker to an individual in the audience. These diversions in turn alter the community’s balance of power as spectators move into the central role which we would expect the speakers to occupy. In addition, this chapter outlines the role of decorum within these disputes and outlines the factors which distinguish what is proper from what is unacceptable within the world of Roman declamation, and by extension within Roman culture as well as cultural memory as a whole.

MULTI-LEVEL VERBAL MARKERS OF SUGGESTION IN PROSECUTION ATTORNEYS’ OPENING STATEMENTS (IN THE SCOPE OF MODERN AMERICAN LEGAL THRILLERS)

The article sets out to justify the author’s opinion on the fact that the main peculiarity of the prosecution attorneys’ opening statements is their power of suggestion, i.e. exerting emotional and psychological influence on the jury with the purpose of changing their emotions, feelings and train of thoughts in favour of the attorney and their client. A lexical-semantic classification of multi-level verbal markers of suggestion has been worked out in the article under consideration to show which language units prosecution attorneys give preference to in order to exert the influence of suggestion on the jury. The classification in question shows that the notion of suggestion exists on all speech levels: phonetic, morphological, lexical-semantic and syntactic, with lexical-semantic being the most abundant in prosecution attorneys’ opening statements. Verbal markers of suggestion on lexical-semantic level were divided into those of direct and indirect nomination. Verbal markers of suggestion on phonetic, morphological and syntactic levels perform only supplementary function in exerting the influence of suggestion on the jury members. The article concludes that the prosecution attorneys purposely use a great amount of multi-level verbal markers of suggestion at the same time to have the massive impact on the jury’s thoughts, emotions, feelings, attitudes. The classification under consideration has been worked out in the scope of modern American legal thrillers, written by professional attorneys who depict the slightest details of real American legal proceedings.

Opening Statements: Theme Singing and Shifting Paradigms for Voicing Feminine Subjectivities as Television Music

This article argues that more scholarly attention should be paid to women’s contributions to the practice of “theme singing,” or the textual and industrial practices of using vocalists as sonic proxies for television characters by articulating programs’ thematic concerns and embodying their tonal dimension in television shows’ credit sequences and soundtracks. Though vulnerable to muting and time shifting, female recording artists—and black women in particular—have always been a fixture of US television production by helping build televisual worlds as theme singers. These professionals help cultivate television programs’ aural sensibilities by literally giving voice to a show’s premise and, in so doing, raise the volume on women’s place in television storytelling as otherwise marginalized subjects. This essay identifies three different types of theme singing that are especially common in television storytelling: theme singing as declaration of selfhood, theme singing as expression of kinship, and theme singing as assertion of community. Further, it analyzes Solange’s and SZA’s involvement with Insecure (HBO, 2016–) as music consultant and soundtrack contributor, respectively, to identify an emerging pattern within contemporary television production of shifting the tonal and thematic properties of theme singing onto licensing by dispensing with original theme music altogether while potentially amplifying more women’s voices as source music.

The brevity and severity of ‘Golden Age’ piracy trials

A sampling of piracy and piracy-related trials involving mainly English (later British) and colonial courts between 1670 and 1731 shows that from opening statements through deliberations they were rapid affairs, few extending beyond a single calendar date, and that on average they appear to have convicted about six of every 10 defendants who pleaded Not Guilty. That conviction figure is impacted by high-volume trials in 1700 and 1722 that acquitted relatively large numbers of defendants; eliminating these two trials from the mix yields a significantly higher conviction rate (about seven in 10) for those who pleaded Not Guilty. This article presents its sampling data, noting appropriate cautions, in the context of the era’s legal proceedings and practices.