Victim Impact Statements, New Media Technologies, and the Classical Rhetoric of Sincerity

Abstract

Long a concern for their interjection of emotional appeals into the sentencing process, victim impact statements (VISs) have recently become even more worrisome to some critics, who see in the growing availability of sophisticated video-editing technology the capacity for even unskilled users to construct testimony in ways that corrupt rather than enable reasoned judgment. Drawing upon a combined analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court case Kelly v. California and classical rhetorical theory, I argue by contrast that, especially in death penalty cases, a jury’s demand for authenticity in performance mitigates the potential impact of such technology precisely because the cultural construction of emotive authenticity requires an outpouring of feeling whose very lack of control testifies to its genuineness. As an artistic and compositional techne, the capacity of new media technologies to evoke, seemingly effortlessly, complex representations of emotional states thus contains within itself a fundamental limitation on its power. Recognizing the importance of authenticity and sincerity also reveals a key element of why the introduction of a VIS remains an attractive option for the prosecution, for in allowing the introduction of a VIS the state secures for itself a rhetoric of sincerity that as an institution it could not otherwise hope to wield.