RT Article
T1 ‘To Shock the Conscience’: Rhetoric in Death Penalty Judgements of the Supreme Court of India
JF South Asia
VO 42
IS 4
SP 694
OP 710
A1 Saikumar, Rajgopal
LA English
YR 2019
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1913614816
AB The dominant paradigm in scholarship on death penalty law in India is doctrinal and empirical. There is an equally indispensable need for a third approach that focuses on the rhetoric of and in death penalty judgements. In the first part of the paper I argue why such an approach is necessary, and in the second part I instantiate this by a close reading of narrative techniques and rhetorical devices deployed in two recent Supreme Court judgements. I show the use of antirrhetic speech, ekphrasis and the ‘reality effect’ woven into the narrative of the taboo on incest, peopled with characters such as ‘diabolical monsters’ plotting ‘sinister designs’. Embedded in these narratives are judges who see themselves as reconstituting a community on the verge of breakdown. In this circular operation, monsters are linguistically created, and the monstrosity of the criminal is then used as a justification for death. Yet such a monster cannot be a wholly non-human figure because intent is necessary for fixing legal responsibility.
K1 Antirrhesis
K1 Supreme Court of India
K1 collective conscience
K1 Death Penalty
K1 Ekphrasis
K1 Evidence
K1 Narrative
K1 Rhetoric
DO 10.1080/00856401.2019.1616246