Racialized Emotions in Criminal Courts: Examining Attorneys’ Racialized Emotional Labor in Jury Trials

• In Event: 30662 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 6: Criminal Legal System/ Actors/ Processes

Abstract

Empirical social science research has revealed various mechanisms perpetuating social inequality in U.S. courts. This study adds to this literature by examining attorneys’ use of racialized emotions in trials and exploring how this is done comparatively and relationally between prosecutors and defense attorneys. To do so, I leverage trial transcript data from a large dataset of transcripts from a courthouse in a large mid-Atlantic city. I conduct abductive qualitative analysis on a stratified random sample of 100 trial transcripts, focusing specifically on trials for violent, non-sexual offenses and oversampling for trials of non-Black defendants and women defendants. Here, I present three main findings. First, I find that, in contrast to research on emotional labor in other settings, attorneys’ emotional labor in trials is primarily about or on behalf of a third party, constituting a unique subset of emotional bids that align with a self-versus-other dichotomy. Furthermore, I find that attorneys’ emotional labor is closely tied to – and operates in service of – strategic portrayals of trial participants that align with hegemonic ideologies and controlling images about Black femininity and masculinity. Second, I find that attorneys’ legal and emotional strategies are intertwined through a process I term moral-emotional contestation. Their trial discourse strays beyond purely legal contestation to debate the morality and human worth of trial participants, which comprise contested moral territories within the discursive landscape of the trial. Third, my analysis reveals that attorneys’ emotional labor is further shaped by an asymmetrical power arrangement between opposing counsel, within which prosecutors having the discursive upper hand. Together, these findings indicate that racialized emotional labor, as enacted through attorneys’ trial discourse, constitutes an important source of discursive inequality in trials that detracts from the procedural protections meant to ensure social equity in U.S. courts.

Author

• Sarah McGill Brown, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill