Making death (in)different: discursive legitimation in death trials

Abstract

Adopting Van Leeuwen’s model of legitimation (2007, 2018), this study critically scrutinizes the ways in which the State validates a death sentence and uncovers patterns of legitimizing strategies, along with their lexico-grammatical manifestations in the penalty phase of capital trials, including moralization, rationalization and authorization. The findings reveal that moralization plays a part in constructing “us-them” boundaries through negative evaluative lexis, agency-oriented transitivity patterns, as well as oppositional reference terms. The use of rationalization, observed in reason and purpose clauses as well as legal lexis and future predicates, emphasizes the legal ideology of facticity, impartiality, and objectivity at the expense of humanistic consideration of the person on trial. Authorization bestows power by incorporating various authoritative voices as well as the jurors’ verdicts in the guilt phase of the trial. It is argued that in their legitimating practice, the State denies capital defendants the full consideration that the law requires and fails to differentiate and justify the necessity of the lethal choice over life imprisonment. This, in turn, potentially leads to the creation of death-inclined jurors.