Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-x4r87 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T21:04:21.629Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Convictability and Discordant Locales: Reproducing Race, Class, and Gender Ideologies in Prosecutorial Decisionmaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Lisa Frohmann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Using ethnographic data, I examine prosecutors' discourse on case convictability (the likelihood of a guilty verdict at trial) in sexual assault cases. The analysis shows how prosecutors construct discordant locales through their categorization of victims, defendants, jurors, and their communities and the location of crime incidents. It demonstrates how prosecutors use discordant locales to justify case rejection. By ascribing stereotypical characteristics of a neighborhood to victims, defendants, and jurors, prosecutors construct distinct groups with different cultures who live in geographically separate spaces and have different schemes through which they interpret the everyday world. To construct discordant locale categorizations, prosecutors employ race, class, and gender imagery. Through this imagery they construct multiple normative standards of moral character of persons and of places. I argue that through the categorizations of place as discordant locales, prosecutors inadvertently reproduce race, class, and gender ideologies in legal decisionmaking. I conclude with policy suggestions for expanding and equalizing citizens' access to justice.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , 1997 , pp. 531 - 556
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I thank the women and men of the sexual assault unit in which I observed for sharing their lives. Without their openness this research would not have been possible. I am very grateful to Nancy A. Matthews, Gregory M. Matoesian, and Mindie Lazarus-Black for their detailed comments and advice, which have played an important role in the development of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and Deborah Levinson, William Black, Michael Maltz, Elizabeth Mertz, Anne Figert, Wayne Kerstetter, Steve Herbert, Jacqueline Battalora, John Hagedorn, Grey Cavendor, and Pamela Brandwein for their encouragement and critical readings.

References

Atkinson, J. Maxwell, & Drew, Paul (1979) Order in Court: The Organization of Verbal Interaction injudicial Settings. Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981 [1935]) “Discourse in the Novel,” trans. Emerson, C. & Holquist, M., in Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, M.. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Benson, Douglas, & Hughes, John A. (1983) “The Use of Categories and the Display of Culture,” in D. Benson & J. A. Hughes, The Perspective of Ethnomethodology. New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Bittner, Egon (1967) “The Police on Skid-Row: A Study of Peace Keeping,” 32 American Sociological Rev. 699–715.Google Scholar
Charmaz, Kathy (1983) “The Grounded Theory Method: An Explication and Interpretation,” in Emerson, R. M., ed., Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron V. (1968) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron V. (1987) “The Interpenetration of Communicative Contexts: Examples from Medical Encounters,” 50 (2) Social Psychology Q. 217–26.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela Yvonne (1981) Women. Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Emerson, Robert M. (1969) Judging Delinquents: Context and Process in Juvenile Court. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Emerson, Robert M., & Paley, Blair (1992) “Organizational Horizons and Complaint-Filing,” in Hawkins, K., ed., The Uses of Discretion. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa (1991) “Discrediting Victims' Allegations of Sexual Assault: Prosecutorial Accounts of Case Rejection,” 38 Social Problems 213–26.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa-(1992) “Screening Sexual Assault Cases: Prosecutorial Decisions to File or Reject Rape Complaints.” Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Sociology, UCLA.Google Scholar
Frohmann, Lisa-(1996) “‘Hard Cases’: Prosecutorial Accounts for Filing Unconvictable Sexual Assault Complaints,” in Lopata, H. Z. & Figert, A. E., eds., Current Research on Occupations and Professions, vol. 9. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Giddings, Paula (1984) When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. New York: W. Morrow.Google Scholar
Glaser, Barney G., & Strauss, Anselm L. (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1981) Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Heritage, John (1983) “Accounts in Action,” in Gilbert, N. G. & Abell, P., eds., Accounts and Action: Surrey Conferences on Sociological Theory and Method. Aldershot, Hampshire, Eng.: Gower.Google Scholar
Abell, P.-(1984) Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Holstein, James A. (1993) Court-Ordered Insanity: Interpretive Practice and Involuntary Commitment. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
hooks, bell (1981) Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Jayyusi, Lena (1984) Categorization and the Moral Order. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Loseke, Donileen R. (1992) The Battered Woman and the Shelters: The Social Construction of Wife Abuse. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Martin, Patricia Yancy, & Powell, R. Marlene (1994) “Accounting for the ‘Second Assault’: Legal Organizations Framing of Rape Victims,” 19 Law & Social Inquiry 853–90.Google Scholar
Mather, Lynn M. (1979) Plea Bargaining or Trial? The Process of Criminal-Case Disposition. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Matoesian, Gregory M. (1993) Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Matoesian, Gregory M.-(1995) “Language, Law, and Society: Policy Implications of the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial,” 29 Law & Society Rev. 669–702.Google Scholar
Maynard, Douglas W. (1984) Inside Plea Bargaining: The Language of Negotiation. New York: Plenum Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mehan, Hugh (1979) Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle (1990) Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class America. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Miller, Frank W. (1970) Prosecution: The Decision to Charge a Suspect with a Crime. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.Google Scholar
Miller, Gale (1994) “Toward Ethnographies of Institutional Discourse: Proposals and Suggestions,” 23 J. of Contemporary Ethnography 280–306.Google Scholar
Miller, Gale, & Holstein, James A. (1991) “Social Problems Work in Street Level Bureaucracies: Rhetoric and Organizational Process,” in Miller, G., ed., Studies in Organizational Sociology: Studies in Honor of Charles K. Warriner. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar
Neubauer, David W. (1974) Criminal Justice in Middle America. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.Google Scholar
Parmentier, Richard J. (1993) “The Political Function of Reported Speech: A Belauan Example,” in Lucy, J. A., ed., Reflexive Language: Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rubinstein, Jonathan (1973) City Police. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1972) “On the Analyzability of Stories by Children,” in Gumperz, J. J. & Hymes, D. H., eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Shields, Rob (1991) Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Skolnick, Jerome H., & Fyfe, James J. (1993) Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Stanko, Elizabeth Anne (1981–82) “The Impact of Victim Assessment on Prosecutors' Screening Decisions: The Case of the New York District Attorney's Office,” 16 Law & Society Rev. 225–39.Google Scholar
Warshaw, Robin (1994) I Never Called It Rape: The MS. Report on Recognizing Fighting, and Surviving Date and Acquaintance Rape. New York: Harper Perennial.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watson, D. R. (1978) “Categorization, Authorization, and Blame-Negotiation in Conversation,” 12 Sociology 105–13.Google Scholar
Watson, D. R. (1983) “The Presentation of the Victim and Motive in Discourse: The Case of Police Interrogations and Interviews,” 8 (1–2) Victimology 31–52.Google Scholar
Wortham, Stanton, & Locher, Michael (1996) “Voicing on the News: An Analytic Technique for Studying Media Bias,” 16 Text 557–85.Google Scholar