Storytelling in the Courtroom: Subjective Justice vs. Objective Process

A fundamental public belief in America is that justice is a mechanical and objective process. The “scales of justice” are viewed as tipping towards equitableness, or moral rightness, as our laws attempt the ideal of justness and moral reason behind actions and their consequences. A statue of Lady Justice holding the “scales of justice” stands outside many courtrooms, personifying the moral force in the judicial system. Often Lady Justice wears a blindfold, representing the ideal of objectivity in the court. 

Justice should be meted out objectively, without fear of favoritism, regardless of a person’s money, power, socioeconomic status or background. Blind justice equals impartial justice (“Representing Justice,” 2013). However watching storytelling in the courtroom shows that in addition to justice being an objective process, justice is in fact subjective as well, and that presentation and interpretation – among many variables – affects the actual outcome of how the legal system will interpret the term “justice.”

One of the metaphors among the criminal trial process is that the trial as a process of story telling. The courtroom process is seen as a jousting battleground with the opposing sides of prosecutor and defender using their verbal abilities in the adversarial setting of the “theatre of the courtroom”.  Television shows such as Law and Order reinforce this metaphor of story telling drama, and the reality is that “the application of law to facts that is involved in a trial is not so much a logical process as a discursive one, the comparison of different narratives or stories” (Maley & Fahey, 1991). The competence of the storyteller, either prosecutor or defender, will affect the outcome in the courtroom, and the determination of what “justice” ends up meaning.

Perceptions of justice depend on the ability of the participants in courtroom drama to tell their stories well, and the histories and backgrounds of those interpreting these stories will filter their perceptions as well.  Societies with many subcultures will have different stories, and tell their own stories differently; some groups that are not familiar with these experiences of “others” may result in biases resulting in differing judicial outcomes for different groups. (Bennett & Feldman, 1981) History is rife with examples of judicial outcomes being affected by a majority biased judicial system that has handed out “justice” in a morally unfair manner when the defendant comes from a minority population.

Furman vs. Georgia was a United States Supreme Court decision that ruled on the requirement for a degree of consistency in the application of the death penalty. The concern was the arbitrariness with which the death penalty was imposed and the racial bias against black defendants in Georgia. In this case Chief Justice Stewart looked at the “circumstances surrounding the imposition of three death sentences being reviewed. The juries in these cases received unrestrained prudence to do what they wished in deciding whether to impose capital punishment. The result, in Stewart’s view, was that the death penalty was wantonly and…freakishly imposed. These death sentences were cruel and unusual in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual” (Furman vs. Georgia, 1972) The Furman vs. Georgia case represents one example of the subjectivity of justice.

In the drama of justice in the courts, presentation, interpretation, bias and other factors continue to make the term “justice” a subjective one. Justice may wear a blindfold outside various courts; however inside the courtroom this ideal of impartiality is not perfectly attainable. Often justice is decided according to the most adept storytelling in the courtroom.

References

Bennett, W., & Felman, M. (1981). Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom - Justice and Judgment in American Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Furman v. Georgia. (1972). Retrieved from Cornell University Law School website: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0408_0238_ZC2.html

Maley, Y., & Fahey, R. (1991). Presenting The Evidence: Constructions Of Reality In Court. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 4(1), 3-17.

Representing Justice | Document Collection Center. (n.d.). Document Collection Center. Retrieved from http://documents.law.yale.edu/representing-justice