Dr. Robin Conley, assistant professor of anthropology at Marshall University, will sign copies of her latest book, “Confronting the Death Penalty: How Language Influences Jurors in Capital Cases,” from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29, at Empire Books and News in downtown Huntington.
The publication explores the means by which language helps to make death penalty decisions possible—how specific linguistic choices mediate and restrict jurors’, attorneys’ and judges’ actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials.
“Language is one of the primary resources we use to make sense of our worlds and the things we do, so I was interested in how language might facilitate this very difficult task,” Conley said.
Drawing from her 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in diverse counties across Texas, Conley noted the specific linguistic choices attorneys make to affect how juries and others view their clients and cases.
“Calling a defendant ‘that guy,’ for instance, instead of by his first name, can dehumanize him and I found that jurors in fact used forms like this when talking about sentencing defendants to death,” Conley said. “Another, less recognized linguistic choice that I write about is how jurors talked about their own role in defendants’ death sentences. Many of them used language that decreased their own responsibility for defendants’ deaths.
“I argue that this is one of the ways they enabled themselves to render a death sentence.”
In addition to signing copies and taking part in a question-and-answer session, Conley will read a short excerpt from the 256-page book, as well as talk about how she came to research capital jurors, what it was like spending time in Texas death penalty trials and some of the goals she had in writing the book.
To learn more about Marshall’s department of sociology and anthropology, visit www.marshall.edu/dosa/.
