Dissertation Defense: Alexandra Slome
Candidate: Alexandra Slome
Major: Linguistics
Advisor: Natalie Schilling, Ph.D.
Title: Discursive Construction of Defendant and Victim Identity in Courtroom Opening Statement Narratives
Social scientists have long been interested in understanding how jurors make verdict decisions, and research in the field of psychology has demonstrated the importance of stories in this decision-making process (Griffin, 2013). In this research, I take a structural and performative narrative analytic approach (Riesman, 2008) to understanding how attorneys construct persuasive, opposing narratives through their identity construction of defendants and victims in the opening statements of U.S. criminal trials. Utilizing frameworks from narrative analysis (Labov, 1972; Davies & Harre, 1990; Bamberg, 1997), I analyze the opening statement narratives of three criminal trials (MN v. Chauvin, FL v. Lewis, and WI v. Rittenhouse) with the goal of better understanding how attorneys create persuasive narratives in part through identity construction of defendants and victims. The analysis shows the attorneys across cases and sides utilize a variety of linguistic strategies including involvement strategies (Tannen, 2007), stance taking (Ochs, 1993; Du Bois, 2007), and comparison (Labov 1972; 1997) to position defendants and victims through attribution of agency, comparison to other groups or individuals, adoption of alternative perspectives, and normative judgements based on sociocultural expectations. These positions contribute to the overarching construction of identities for defendants and victims which are evaluated against relevant legal standards to support the main point of the narrative: the defendant is guilty or not guilty. This work will connect linguistic research on opening statement narratives with psychological research on juror decision-making, on tribute to the relatively sparse literature on identity construction in the courtroom, and provide a granular analysis of one way in which courtroom narratives are linguistically constructed to be more persuasive.