With or without a purpose? Judges’ appraisal of offenders or their behaviour in six sentencing remarks

IF 0.8 3区 文学 Q3 COMMUNICATION Text & Talk Pub Date : 2022-08-15 DOI:10.1515/text-2020-0228
Xin Dai
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引用次数: 1

Abstract

Abstract This study examines judges’ language use in sentencing remarks in the Crown Courts of England and Wales. Six sentencing remarks were selected from all those available on the UK judiciary website (by October 2016). The cases selected for closer analysis are as similar to each other as possible, so as to ensure that the differences in the discursive features of the sentencing remarks largely reflect the differences in judges’ sentencing practices. It is found that judges selectively use an appraisal strategy – using moralised purposes to invoke judgements of offenders or their behaviour – across the six sentencing remarks. Judges’ use (or non-use) of the appraisal strategy is found to be correlating with their sentencing decisions: i.e., judges opt for the appraisal strategy when their sentencing decisions are below or further above the starting point, but not when the decisions are just a few years above the starting point. The finding reveals that the statutory starting point exercises a binding effect on the judges’ sentencing practices despite the judges having the discretion to disregard the starting point. Such a finding not only provides an insight into the judges’ sentencing practices, but also demonstrates that appraisal analysis is an effective means to get access to sentencing, which seemed so inaccessible to academic research.
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有目的还是没有目的?法官在六次宣判中对罪犯或其行为的评价
摘要本研究调查了英格兰和威尔士皇家法院法官在量刑言论中的语言使用情况。从英国司法机构网站上的所有评论中选出了六条量刑评论(截至2016年10月)。选择进行更仔细分析的案件尽可能彼此相似,以确保量刑言论话语特征的差异在很大程度上反映了法官量刑实践的差异。研究发现,法官在六次量刑中有选择地使用评估策略——使用道德化的目的来援引对罪犯或其行为的判断。法官使用(或不使用)评估策略与他们的量刑决定有关:即,当他们的量刑决策低于或进一步高于起点时,法官会选择评估策略,但当判决仅高于起点几年时,法官不会选择。调查结果显示,法定起点对法官的量刑实践具有约束力,尽管法官有权无视起点。这一发现不仅让我们深入了解了法官的量刑实践,还表明评估分析是获得量刑信息的有效手段,而学术研究似乎无法获得这一信息。
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来源期刊
Text & Talk
Text & Talk Multiple-
CiteScore
1.70
自引率
16.70%
发文量
70
期刊介绍: Text & Talk (founded as TEXT in 1981) is an internationally recognized forum for interdisciplinary research in language, discourse, and communication studies, focusing, among other things, on the situational and historical nature of text/talk production; the cognitive and sociocultural processes of language practice/action; and participant-based structures of meaning negotiation and multimodal alignment. Text & Talk encourages critical debates on these and other relevant issues, spanning not only the theoretical and methodological dimensions of discourse but also their practical and socially relevant outcomes.
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