“I Am Not a Computer”: A Multimodal Co-construction of Justice in a Real Jury Deliberation

Overview

This study presents the first multimodal analysis of an actual jury deliberation, examining how jurors construct justice through embodied communicative practices rather than abstract legal reasoning. The research analyzes how jurors employ laughter, gesture, and other communicative modalities during deliberation. The analysis departs from conventional jury research methodologies that rely on mock or hypothetical juries, instead examining the naturalistic interactional processes through which deliberation unfolds. The study addresses a significant gap in empirical research on actual jury decision-making. Two analytical components structure the investigation: the interactive coordination of laughter with co-speech gesture in establishing authoritative narrative stance, and the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in the pursuit of justice. The theoretical contribution lies in demonstrating how justice circulates through embodied conduct rather than existing as a purely cognitive or legalistic construct.

Methods and approach

The methodology employs analysis of naturally occurring jury deliberation, examining the integration of multiple communicative modalities including co-speech gesture and other embodied resources. The approach investigates poetic organization in relation to stance-taking during deliberation. Unlike conventional jury research that relies on mock or hypothetical juries, this methodology prioritizes the interactive features of multimodal conduct during actual deliberation, treating the deliberation process as the primary object of analysis. The research examines how laughter integrates with co-speech gesture to provide authoritative stance to jurors' narratives, and how poetics, gesture, and stance interact in the pursuit of justice.

Key Findings

The analysis reveals how jurors construct authoritative narrative stances through the coordinated deployment of laughter and gesture during deliberation. The first part of the analysis demonstrates how laughter integrates with co-speech gesture to establish authoritative stance in jurors' narratives. The second part examines the multimodal interplay among poetics, gesture, and stance in pursuit of justice. The integrated analysis of communicative modalities operating together provides a comprehensive account of deliberative discourse. The findings demonstrate that justice, rather than functioning as an abstract theoretical concept, circulates through and is constituted by embodied interactional practices. The multimodal resources jurors employ reveal the practical, situated character of legal decision-making as it unfolds in real time, with meaning constitution emerging through coordinated communicative practices that extend beyond verbal reasoning.

Implications

The research establishes that understanding jury deliberation requires examining the interactional processes through which verdicts emerge. The findings demonstrate limitations in conventional jury research methodologies including mock or hypothetical juries, which exclude the interactive features of multimodal conduct central to actual deliberation processes. The study contributes to linguistic anthropology and sociolegal scholarship by showing how abstract legal concepts like justice are instantiated through concrete embodied practices rather than existing as purely cognitive phenomena. The demonstration that meaning constitution in legal settings emerges through the integration of speech, gesture, and other modal resources has implications for understanding how social actors coordinate multiple semiotic channels in institutional contexts. The analysis suggests that theories of legal decision-making must account for the embodied, interactional, and multimodal character of deliberation rather than treating it as disembodied information processing or application of legal rules to facts.