In her new book, Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases, Marshall University Anthropology Professor Robin Conley exam­ines ​“how lan­guage fil­ters, restricts, and at times is used to manip­u­late jurors’ expe­ri­ences while they serve on cap­i­tal tri­als and again when they reflect on them after­ward.” Conley spent fif­teen months in ethno­graph­ic field­work observ­ing four Texas cap­i­tal tri­als and inter­view­ing the jurors involved. She ana­lyzes the lan­guage used in those tri­als, as well as writ­ten legal texts, to gain a greater under­stand­ing of how jurors go about mak­ing the deci­sion for life or death. She also explores the ques­tion­ing jurors under­go as to their beliefs about the death penal­ty, char­ac­ter­iz­ing it as ​“social­iza­tion into killing.” She writes that death penal­ty tri­als involve a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ca­tion prac­tices — such as ​“dehu­man­iz­ing ref­er­ences to defen­dants that stymie empa­thy between them and jurors, writ­ten and oral instruc­tions that allow jurors to deny their per­son­al involve­ment in defen­dants’ deaths” — that cre­ate dis­tance between jurors and defen­dants and ​“deny the human­is­tic side of legal deci­sion-mak­ing.” In the book’s con­clu­sion, she writes of the impor­tance of this type of lan­guage for the main­te­nance of the death penal­ty: ​“It is the words with which attor­neys address poten­tial jurors dur­ing voir dire, the writ­ten instruc­tions on which jurors rely in the delib­er­a­tion room, and the talk about defen­dants through­out the tri­al that main­tain the per­sis­tent oper­a­tion of the death penal­ty. By sub­vert­ing oth­er forms of expe­ri­ence, more­over, par­tic­u­lar, author­i­ta­tive modes of lan­guage allow jurors to send defen­dants to their deaths.”

(R. Conley, ​“Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases,” Oxford Studies in Language and Law, 2016.)

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