Between Victim and Offender: Gender, Race, and the Transformation of Gender-Based Violence in U.S. Capital Trials

• In Event: Violence, Policing, and Criminal Law

Abstract

My paper examines how women capital defendants’ accounts of gender-based violence (GBV) are transformed as they move through the trial. I ask: 1) how do these narratives circulate across trial phases—from direct and cross-examination to expert testimony and closing arguments? and 2) how do gender and race shape the ways such accounts are evaluated?

I conceptualize capital trials as institutional settings where legal, expert, and cultural understandings of violence intersect. Capital cases offer a distinct terrain as they highlight the ambivalence of the defendant who appears simultaneously as a victim of violence and a perpetrator of lethal harm, forcing courts to reconcile accounts of trauma with demands for accountability and moral judgment. This tension is further mediated by gendered and racialized expectations about femininity and respectability.

Empirically, the paper draws on qualitative discourse analysis of forty capital trial transcripts (1985–2023) to trace how testimony around gender-based violence experienced by the defendants is produced, translated, and reinterpreted by courtroom actors. I aim to contribute to law and society scholarship in several ways. I extend feminist and critical sociolegal analyses of credibility by showing how courts negotiate the unstable figure of the woman who is both victim and offender. I contribute to the sociology of knowledge by exploring how legal institutions transform experiential accounts of violence into legally meaningful or unintelligible forms of knowledge.

Author

• Esha Sraboni, Cornell University