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

Abstract

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)*

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