Moral Legitimation in Courtroom Discourse: A Proposal

Abstract

Embracing the view that the legitimacy of a social practice is discursively established and negotiated, this study proposes a linguistically grounded model for moral legitimation and examines how the State (i.e., the prosecuting lawyer) justifies a death sentence. Based on the closing summation of six capital trials, the study identifies key moral legitimation strategies and reveals the State’s ideology about crime and punishment. It is argued that such discursive strategies as evaluation, labelling, analogy, agency assignment, and emphasis on the victim’s lost future not only alienate the person on trial from the jury and the victims but also over-emphasize the “us-them” boundaries. In effect, the State denies specific personal circumstances, as required by the law.