Ah. Some... Words.

Ruth Walker at the Christian Science Monitor has a fascinating piece about jurors, judges' instructions and vocabulary.
Here's part of what she says:
There are, after all, places where language is a matter of life and death. The deliberation room where a jury considers sentencing options in a capital case is one of them. ....
...One of the [conference] presenters remarked en passant that jurors, asked to determine whether a defendant found guilty of a capital crime should be given a life sentence or the death penalty, are instructed to consider "mitigating" or "aggravating" factors...

Quite often, he said, jurors don't really know what either of those words means....

[Jury instructions]... can be utterly baffling to jurors, researchers have found. Shari Seidman Diamond, at Northwestern University Law School, described one such set of instructions as "unconstitutionally incomprehensible," in a 1993 journal article called "Instructing on Death."

She quoted what she called a "quadruple negative" sentence from some legal language in use in Illinois:

"If you do not unanimously find from your consideration of all the evidence there are no mitigating factors sufficient to preclude imposition of a death sentence, then you should sign the verdict requiring the court to impose a sentence other than death." In lay terms: "To impose the death penalty, all jurors must agree that the defendant did something much worse than just plain murder."

In this universe, is it any wonder why a criminal defense lawyer like the late Johnnie Cochran would seize on a line like "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit"? It's easy to imagine how, amid the din of legal-speak, such an utterance would fall on the ears of a bewildered juror like a snatch of familiar melody tucked into an avant-garde composition.


Having just chatted with a middle school teacher frustrated with students' inability to get beyond exclaiming "awesome!" 20 times a day, I am intrigued by this and a study several months ago that described the decline in American speech in the last 40 years. While I can't find the study at the moment, it, as I recall, said that Americans are using ever-shorter sentences, often relying on quick, snappy one-liners, often borrowed from TV, as a substitute for dialogue. And, since I've spent a huge amount of time in the last couple of months watching cable news TV, the sloppiness of language, facts and ideas is truly scary. A minor detail: "Bill Gates said a couple of weeks back" that he was retiring. Well, he said it June 16, not that difficult to report. Yes, it's a very minor detail, but one easy to get right. Try watching cable TV news for a while and you'll see what I mean. The problem is exacerbated by a recent onslaught of especially bubbleheaded, bright-eyed women (What kind of lights are those studios using?) determined to act like giddy schoolgirls.
Where are we headed when advertising slogans and bad sitcom writing supplant educated conversation?