Facts into faults: The grammar of guilt in jury deliberations

Abstract

Jurors customarily do their work with very little by way of instruction from the court, other than about the law. This suggests that they enter the jury room with the relevant cognitive and interactional tools at the ready, drawn from everyday life. This paper focuses on a specific conversational device jurors use to do their work: conditional-contrastive inculpations (CCIs), whereby the defendant’s actions are compared unfavorably to what a normal, innocent person would have done, with the implication that the discrepancy indicates guilt. We examine the logic, variants, sequential precursors, and immediate consequences of this phenomenon in two real-life American criminal juries deliberating the same charges. This study offers a rare glimpse into the operation of real (rather than mock) juries, and specifically the way in which they appropriate a practice from ordinary conversation in order to perform the unordinary work demanded of them by the legal system.

The Problematics of Gender for Aviation Emergency Communication during an Inflight Emergency: A Case Study

“…Early studies of workplace interactions and talk in institutional settings explored how the procedures used to organize talk can be selectively implemented to accomplish the goals of that setting (e.g., Atkinson and Drew 1979;Boden and Zimmerman 1991;Drew and Heritage 1992). Current conversation analytic research on talk in a wide range of workplaces includes Asmuß (2008), Barnes (2007), Kevoe-Feldman (2018), and Vöge (2010) in business settings; Garcia (2019) and Gibson and Fox (2021) in legal settings; and Peräkylä (2019), Stivers and Timmermans (2020), and Wang (2020) in medical settings. The conversation analytic approach to the study of interaction is well-suited to the study of talk in workplace settings, including aviation (e.g., Frankel 2000;Neville 2001;2004a;2004b;2006;Arminen et al 2010;Arminen, Koskela, and Palukka 2014;Tuccio and Nevile 2017;Tuccio and Garcia 2020).…”