‘It was him’: Representational strategies, identity, and legitimization in the Boston Marathon bombing trial narratives

Adopting a systemic functional linguistic view of language as a system of options from which language users choose to construct meaning, this study seeks to critically explicate the constitutive roles of reference terms and event description in accomplishing character positioning in the opening event of a recent high-profile capital trial, the Boston Marathon bombing trial of 2015. Incorporating Halliday’s concept of transitivity and Van Leeuwen’s inventory of social actors, the quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals that the prosecution and defence differ starkly in representational practice and that both reference terms and event description are prime stylistic devices that synergistically serve not only to construct and ascribe polarized identities to characters in their narratives but also to (de-)humanize the defendant before the verdict is reached, thereby (de-)legitimizing blame and responsibility and potentially influencing the jury’s decisions.

The Impact of Angry Versus Sad Victim Impact Statements on Mock Jurors’ Sentencing Decisions in a Capital Trial

The present study tested the effects of angry and sad victim impact statements (VIS) on jury eligible participants’ decisions. Death qualified participants ( N = 581) watched the penalty phase of a capital trial that varied the presence and emotional content of the VIS (angry, sad, or no VIS) along with the strength of mitigating evidence (weak or strong). Results revealed that Angry VIS led to an increase in death sentences, whereas Sad VIS did not. Furthermore, participants who reported becoming angry during the trial were more likely to render a death sentence, but participants who became sad during the trial were not. No interaction was found between VIS and strength of mitigating evidence, but participants exposed to the angry VIS did rate the mitigating evidence as less important to their decisions. The results indicate that VIS are not inherently biasing, nor are all emotions equally impactful on sentencing decisions.

Stabilizing violence

Narratives matter. They shape the social world in which they circulate, reflecting and refracting the cultural limits of what narratives can be told, in what setting, to whom. From this perspective, they structure how we make sense of ourselves, as members of a community, but they also structure how we understand right and wrong, good and evil. Nowhere is this more apparent than in capital murder trials in which the narratives that are constructed are literally life and death matters. The research on narrative processes in capital trials documents how the courtroom is a place for “story-battles” where each narrative works to disqualify the other and legitimize itself, in an effort to structure jurors’ decisions. This is accentuated in the penalty phase of the capital trial where both mitigating and aggravating narratives “thicken” the narratives told in the guilt phase; in the penalty phase jurors make the decision to sentence the defendant to either life without the possibility of parole, or to death. While some research of juror decision-making shows that jurors favor the prosecution narrative and make up their minds to give the death sentence independent of the penalty phase narratives, other research on mitigation narratives shows that contextualizing the defendant, via mitigating narratives, can overturn the power of the prosecution narrative and lead to a life, rather than a death, sentence. This research seeks to avoid efforts to associate juror cognitive processes to narrative processes and instead seeks to examine the connection between jury sentencing decisions, for life or death, as a function of narrative closure which is, in turn, defined in terms of two narrative dimensions: structural complexity and moral transparency. Using this framework, the penalty phase narratives in two capital trials are compared along these dimensions; the findings suggest that moral transparency and structural complexity provide the foundations for narrative closure in the penalty phase, as both structural simplicity and moral obtuseness are characteristic of narratives that are not adopted by the jury. While the sample size is small, the narrative data is rich, and the study, overall, is intended not to suggest a causal relation between dimensions of narrative closure and jury sentencing, but rather aims to illustrate a method for assessing narratives in relation to jury sentencing in the penalty phase of capital trials. However, at the broadest level, the paper offers a framework for examining the way that narrative works to contain violence.