Speaking Stories to Power: An Analysis of Rhetorical Style and Identity in Jury Deliberations

Abstract

Many scholars promote deliberation as a democratic ideal due to its purported commitment to egalitarianism and diversity. However, some theorists contend that the structure of deliberation reinforces existing social hierarchies. As a deliberative body within the often- discriminatory criminal justice system, juries are an important setting in which to examine this rhetorical inequality. In this thesis, I argue that jurors’ identities affect how their fact- based and narrative arguments are deployed and received. Using over 21,000 sentences from fifty-eight mock jury deliberations, I quantitatively investigate whether jurors from privileged social groups are more likely to rely on fact-based statements and less likely to use personal stories as compared to jurors from disadvantaged groups. I find that certain demographic characteristics, such as income and gender, are associated at the powerful ends of their spectrum with more frequent use of fact-based statements. I supplement this statistical analysis with a qualitative exploration of how jurors’ social identities influence their peers’ reception of their fact-based and narrative arguments. I find that although jurors generally find fact-based statements more convincing than narrative arguments, these reactions can vary depending on the speaker’s identity. These results suggest that descriptive representation is not sufficient to ensure that diverse perspectives are incorporated into jury deliberations.