Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives: Exploring the role of rhetoric

Abstract

Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicting their wrongful convictions, we find exoneree activists convey accepted critiques of criminal justice system processing through familiar tropes that reinforce shared understanding with their audience. When representing their unique suffering and conveying a more critical perspective, exonerees marshal sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes. These rhetorical devices convey irony that encourages listeners to question their assumptions, thereby, enhancing audience receptivity to exonerees’ perspectives. We consider the broader significance of figurative language in narrative representations of justice-system involvement.

Keywords

exonerees narrative criminology rhetorical figures tellability wrongful conviction

Introduction

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate globally, incarcerating more than 2.2 million prisoners, or 860 people per 100,000 citizens (Kaeble and Glaze, 2016). Recent research estimates that 4–6% of all U.S. convictions are in error, suggesting that thousands of innocent people are wrongfully imprisoned every year (Gross et al., 2014; Loeffler et al., 2019). Exonerees, a subset of this group, have been wrongfully convicted of a crime, imprisoned, and subsequently exonerated. The National Registry of Exonerations lists more than 2700 exonerations in the U.S. to date (National Registry of Exonerations, 2020). Since 1973, at least 185 wrongfully convicted persons were serving death sentences (Death Penalty Information Center, 2021).

Scholars have begun to document exonerees’ experiences, and some of this work draws on exonerees’ narratives (Leo, 2005; National Institute of Justice, 2016; Westervelt and Cook, 2012). That exonerees have the opportunity to tell their story is essential for several reasons. Through storytelling, individuals can organize their experiences into meaningful episodes to help them make sense of what has happened (Loseke, 2019; Maruna and Mann, 2006; Sandberg, 2016). Reaching an audience that serves as a collective witness may help exonerees cope with their traumatic experiences and build a new identity in light of them (Riessman, 2007; Ross, 2003). Moreover, through storytelling, death row exoneree activists, who are the focus of our research, raise awareness about wrongful convictions and the challenges associated with exoneration (Konvisser and Werry, 2017).

When making sense of significant life events, exonerees, like all storytellers, narrate their experiences by drawing on pre-existing cultural narratives, which include familiar characters, plots, and narrative devices. Drawing upon familiar narrative templates enables narrators to craft stories that both personally feel right and help establish a shared understanding with members of their audience, allowing the latter to better cognitively and emotionally connect to the experience of the former (Loseke, 2019). Establishing such an interpretive connection may be difficult given the conventions of narrative tellability, which we define as the qualities that make a story worthy of being told and heard. Tellability is critical in determining how a story will be received by its audience (Norrick, 2005; Schaefer and Tewksbury, 2018; Smith and Sparkes, 2008). Establishing tellability, however, can be difficult as audiences have expectations that delimit stories they will take in (Norrick, 2005; Smith and Sparkes, 2008). While audiences expect stories to be newsworthy, they find it challenging to listen to stories that are socially inappropriate and/or not relatable (Jackl, 2018; Norrick, 2005; Schaefer and Tewksbury, 2018; Smith and Sparkes, 2008; Yeo, 2020). They may also reject a story deemed too outlandish, socially challenging, or frightening (Yeo, 2020).

Like all storytellers, exonerees have a lot at stake when navigating tellability since narrators whose stories are deemed untellable risk delegitimization and even stigmatization (Polletta et al., 2011). The stakes are even higher for activists who try to narratively persuade audience members to adopt their social and political message. When trying to reach an audience, narrators’ situations are complicated because tellability changes depending on the narrator, the context surrounding his or her narration, and the audience that listens to their stories (Jackl, 2018; Norrick, 2005; Smith and Sparkes, 2008). If tellability is negotiated between narrators and listeners based on shared norms within local contexts (Norrick, 2005; Schaefer and Tewksbury, 2018; Smith and Sparkes, 2008), then how might death-row exoneree activists navigate tellability in their public narratives, which convey experiences that are undoubted, newsworthy but also hard to listen to because they are emotionally, socially, and politically challenging?

We empirically consider the tellability of exoneree narratives by drawing on narratives created for Witness to Innocence (WTI), the only national organization in the United States composed of and led by exonerated death row survivors and their family members (Witness to Innocence, 2020). Individuals who are wrongfully convicted and exonerated experience a unique set of harms (Campbell and Denov, 2004). Even after their exonerations, exonerees face social stigma, which affects relationships and exacerbates other difficulties they may face when trying to obtain employment because of their limited education, abridged work histories, and their possible “criminal history” since some exonerees never have their criminal records expunged (Clow and Leach, 2015; Shlosberg et al., 2014; Westervelt and Cook, 2012). To help, exoneree assistance organizations provide information and support to exonerees within a community of like-minded others (Gies, 2017; Norris, 2017) and offer a forum for exonerees to generate narratives about their experiences (Leo, 2017; Westervelt and Cook, 2012).

We specifically address three questions. 1) How do exonerees publicly make narrative sense of their experiences? 2) What is the content and form of these narrative representations? 3) How do the forms of narrative rhetoric that exonerees employ facilitate the tellability of their narratives? We find that death-row exonerees narrate experiences of wrongful conviction, imprisonment, and post-exoneration activism by drawing on several rhetorical devices – including tropes, sarcasm, metaphors, and litotes. Specifically, we argue that exonerees use tropes to represent widely known problems with criminal justice system processes. However, when narrating politically and emotionally challenging facets of their experiences, exonerees deploy more disruptive figures of speech, including sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes, which convey irony or a contradiction between what is expected and reality. These devices enhance the tellability of exoneree narratives because the social critique that irony implies may help destabilize audience members’ taken-for-granted ideas and create a new shared understanding (Wieslander, 2021). Our approach is novel for its focus on figures of speech as a narrative mechanism that facilitates the communicative relationship between a narrator and his/her audience. In our discussion, we theorize about these patterns and discuss the significance of our research for future scholarship.

Exoneree activists’ narrative challenges in reaching their audience

Exoneree activists convey the injustices they have suffered to increase public knowledge of wrongful convictions. Like all social movement actors, exoneree activists must express their socially and culturally challenging arguments and demands in a manner that is resonant with a public audience. In their research, d’Anjou and Van Male (1998) argue that British slave abolitionists in the late 1700s addressed this contradiction by manipulating the interpretive themes of their message to better connect to mainstream perspectives and to slowly advance a set of ideas that broadened audience members’ views. Building on d’Anjou and Van Male (1998), we assume that when trying to reach an audience that includes individuals with a range of perspectives on the criminal justice system, death row exoneree activists face a similar communicative contradiction. We conceptualize this communication challenge in terms of narrative tellability.

To be heard and accepted by an audience, a story must satisfy the upper and lower boundaries of narrative tellability. Some stories do not meet minimum tellability criteria because they are deemed uneventful or uninteresting by those who hear them. Stories may breach the upper boundary of tellability because of the narrator and the content of his or her story. A story may be untellable because a narrator finds some experiences to be too hard to put into words. Stories can also be untellable if audience members either judge narrators to be suspect or find the content of their stories too outlandish, socially challenging, or frightening to listen to (Ochs and Capps, 2001; Shuman, 2012; Yeo, 2020).

When considering exonerees’ narratives, it is also essential to recognize that tellability standards are negotiated between narrators and audiences based not only on expectations in the immediate story-telling context, but also by those associated with the broader socio-historical context in which narration takes place (Savolainen, 2017). An exonerated death row survivor’s message is judged as tellable, in other words, based on attitudes towards the criminal justice system and what the public expects explicitly to hear from justice-involved persons. Public support for the death penalty has declined markedly over the past several years (Jones, 2019). Some of this shift may be attributable to public recognition of wrongful convictions (Norris and Mullinix, 2020). Still, the general public holds modestly supportive views of the criminal justice system (Gallup, Inc., 2020), although evidence suggests this may be changing (Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 2020; Blizzard, 2018). Relatedly, justice-involved persons themselves proffer varied and sometimes conflicting public narratives on their experiences. Some foreground personal change and redemption when narrating their carceral experiences (Lynn, 2021). In marked contrast, other formerly incarcerated persons offer a radical critique of the legal system and advocate for political and social change (Lynn, 2021). Taken together, at any given time, there are multiple, potentially conflicting public narratives regarding the criminal justice system and its functioning. These various perspectives form the narrative backdrop against which the tellability of exonerees’ stories is judged.

In a social and cultural context where public perspectives on the criminal justice system are varied and in flux, individuals will likely have mixed responses to exoneree narratives. Some audience members will undoubtedly be sympathetic to exonerees and readily accept their message. Other audience members, however, may find death row exonerees’ narratives untellable because they either question exonerees’ credibility as narrators, stigmatize exonerees because of their liminal status that is hard for some to make sense of, or find the content of their stories too emotionally or politically challenging (Beech, 2011). Some audience members, for instance, may support the criminal justice system generally despite the specific harms of wrongful conviction. Audiences may also reject exonerees’ narratives because of their association with the death-penalty abolitionist perspective championed by WTI (see also Malkani, 2018).

Given these communicative challenges, we focus on an element of death-sentenced exoneree activists’ narratives that, we argue, enhances the tellability of their stories. Specifically, we focus on exonerees’ use of rhetorical devices, which we define as words or phrases that entail an intentional deviation from ordinary language to convey meaning and persuade others. Rhetorical processes are a regular feature of all communication, which animate the way human beings think, construct their reality, and persuade themselves and others of particular points of view (Watson, 1995). Some rhetorical devices, such as tropes, facilitate narrative tellability because they have collective meaning across broad audiences and easily reinforce shared understanding. Other rhetorical devices play a more complex role in facilitating narrative tellability by expressing irony, which occurs when what actually happens turns out to be completely different from what would be expected. At the core of exonerees’ experiences is a tragic irony: they were punished despite being criminally innocent. We show that exonerees marshal several forms of rhetoric, including sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes, which convey the irony of their situation in various ways. Irony as a form of rhetoric is uniquely suited to help individuals immediately and unconsciously adjust to complex circumstances (Gibbs, 2002). Irony narratives also prompt those who hear them to question their assumptions and even transform their views (Watson, 1995; Wieslander, 2021. Exonorees’ use of sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes, therefore, lubricates the more challenging aspects of exonerees’ narratives, enhancing their tellability. Before turning to our analysis, we briefly lay out our study focus and research strategy.

Study methods

We collected video testimony posted by WTI, one of several assistance organizations focused on wrongful convictions (Norris, 2017). Nobel Prize nominee Sister Helen Prejean helped establish WTI in 2003 (Witness to Innocence, 2020). Organized by and for exonerees who have spent time on death row, WTI educates the public about wrongful convictions and engages in activism seeking to abolish the death penalty (Witness to Innocence, 2020). Exonerees serve on WTI’s board of directors, engage in outreach and education through media commentary, testify before state legislatures, and participate in the organization’s speakers’ bureau (Witness to Innocence, 2020).

Study data include 38 narratives of members of the WTI speakers’ bureau posted on the organization’s website. Specifically, data include 29 verbatim audio transcriptions of all posted video narratives from 2011 to 2015. These videos vary in length from 35 seconds to 14 minutes 24 seconds, with an average length of 4 minutes 47 seconds. For the nine exonerees whose video narratives were missing or malfunctioning at the time of data collection, we analyzed written texts and interviews posted in the same “Meet Our Exoneree Members” section of the WTI site as the video interviews. It is appropriate to combine these data sources, which, in our view, are all constructed for a similar purpose: to convey the public, innocence-movement story of exonerees’ experience with the criminal justice system and what went wrong with their legal cases. We see these narratives as consequential and worthy of investigation because they represent the WTI speaker’s bureau’s official public story. Of the exonerees in our sample, 55% were African-American, 39% white, and 5% Latino. Only one was a woman, and their average time incarcerated was 14.1 years.

We conceptualize exonerees’ narratives as forms of testimony, defined as a declaration of personal truth that takes a side in an explicit or implicit debate (Park-Fuller, 2000). To better understand these narrative testimonies in context, we also collected and analyzed the written text about exonerees’ cases posted by WTI and the Innocence Network website (National Registry of Exonerations, 2020). As the data used for this study were publicly available and pre-dated our investigation, they were exempt from human subjects review (Robinson, 2001). Our developing analysis was also informed by several in-depth interviews with exonerees gathered for an associated study. Please see (Shlosberg et al., 2020) for further methodological details.

In keeping with our social constructionist assumptions about narrative, we analyzed our audio transcripts of exoneree videos and written interview texts for both form and content. Rooted in the holistic narrative analysis approach developed by Lieblich et al. (1998) and several insights from Labov (1972), we organized our analysis around questions about what happened (plot) and who was involved (characterization). Specifically, the following key questions guided the first stage in our analysis: How did wrongful convictions occur? What happened afterward? Who is involved in the story? How does the narrator represent his/her own and others’ experiences? How does the narrator speak for others implicitly or directly by weaving others’ speech directly into their stories (Park-Fuller, 2000)?

To examine exoneree narratives, we identified recurrent patterns and themes in our narrative data (Patton, 1990). We began exploring stories through a “literal coding,” tagging wrongful conviction and imprisonment descriptions. We then analyzed this coded material to identify figurative language and rhetorical features. We assume that figurative language and rhetorical elements help bring narratives alive and create a conventional bridge for meaning and interpretation for the teller and audience members (Langellier, 2001). We analyze rhetorical features and figurative language to assess how they appear in a given exoneree transcript and present a socio-cultural analysis for how audience members likely receive/interpret such text (Berger, 2010; Sandberg, 2016). Finally, based on the patterns we identified across exonerees’ narratives; we reorganized our restored data to highlight key narrative elements across our data.

Our work preserves exonerees’ names to give them a voice and because the details of their cases are widely known. In a context where participants’ identities are public, it is essential to articulate a clear perspective on representation. Although mainstream research protocols are careful to solicit voluntary participation, typically, study participants have either no or limited control over how they are represented in research (Anderson and Proto, 2016). There is a growing debate in the social sciences about whether or not researchers should maintain confidentiality by providing pseudonyms for research participants, organizations, and other entities in research (Jerolmack and Murphy, 2019). Researchers who work from critical perspectives raise concerns that masking identities obscures participants’ voices and impinges on their right to self-representation (Fine, 1994). In this context, they keep some entities confidential while identifying individuals whose circumstances are publicly recognizable, which is the approach we adopt (Guenther, 2009).

Our perspective on representation aligns with our overall approach to study rigor. Like other qualitative researchers, we presume there is no single unequivocal truth to convey (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). While recognizing that our interpretation is particular, we used analytic procedures to enhance findings’ dependability (Lincoln and Guba, 1985) . Specifically, the first two authors coded the transcripts to check selective perception of the data and identify interpretive blind spots. The first author then analyzed coded data, created an audit trail by writing memos of her thinking and analysis, and maintained an established set of procedures to scaffold theory and research on narrative and identity (Lincoln and Guba, 1985).

Our work also presents a partial view because of study limitations. Most notably, in this preliminary analysis, we examine findings thematically to highlight language use and our presumptions about their meanings. We did not separate results based on differences in exonerees’ experiences, such as length of imprisonment, or background, such as age and race/ethnic background, which are material circumstances that likely shape personal narratives (Rajah et al., 2014). Because study data are derived from short video narratives and written texts of a small group of exoneree activists, our story may not be directly relevant to all exonerees.

Findings

Narrators strive to communicate with their audiences and have several tools available to them that facilitate this process (Watson, 1995). Narrators use figures of speech in everyday talk to solidify their viewpoints and persuade others (Watson, 1995). Using rhetorical devices, we argue, exonerees can convey the full range of their experience and perspectives on the criminal justice system. Specifically, rhetoric enables exonerees to convey both widely shared perspectives, highly critical, as well as unimaginable experiences in a tellable manner, thereby facilitating a shared understanding between themselves and their audience members (Frank, 2010; Sparkes and Smith, 2014; Zigon, 2014). In what follows, we show that exonerees represent widely acknowledged problems with criminal justice processes through familiar narrative tropes when narrating their wrongful convictions. When conveying messages that push the upper boundary of narrative tellability, they marshal a range of figures of speech that convey irony, which make these messages more palatable to a broad audience.

Tropes in exoneree narratives represent tellable narratives of wrongful conviction

Death row exoneree activists marshal tropes to represent broadly accepted views on how and why wrongful conviction occurs. Drawing on cultural criminology, we conceptualize tropes as words and phrases that reference “agreed-upon stories” or make allusions to pre-existing systems of interpretation (Sandberg, 2016: 3, 13). Through tropes, exonerees point to stories about the criminal justice system with which audiences are already familiar (Sandberg, 2016). The rhetoric of criminal justice system error is now a prominent and accepted narrative represented in both popular culture and academic discourse. This narrative derives much of its power from innocent victims of the justice system, such as wrongfully convicted persons (Hartnett and Larson, 2006). Death Row exoneree activists use two familiar narrative tropes – the frame-up and tunnel vision – to represent circumstances where criminal justice actors pre-decided their guilt and manipulated evidence to wrongfully convict them.

This is what happened in the case of Nathan Fields, who was acquitted for a double homicide after spending almost 20 years in prison, including more than 11 years on death row. Fields explains, “it started off as a classic frame-up. The police had rigged the lineup. [The police] put me in a line up I was the only individual with a tattoo on my arm that signified me as a member of … they had rival organization members viewing the lineup.” Various factors may influence police lineups’ outcomes, such as presentation, the instructions given to witnesses, whether or not the lineup administrator knows who the alleged perpetrator is, and visual factors associated with alleged perpetrators (Albright, 2017). In Fields’s case, he bore a tattoo, which served as an identity announcement that prompted witnesses to designate him as guilty (Flowe and Humphries, 2011). By characterizing his wrongful conviction as a “classic frame-up,” Fields refers to a widely known situation in which a person is implicated as guilty of a crime based on false or misleading evidence or procedures (Stratton, 2012, 2013). “Being framed” involves making someone innocent look guilty by putting them in a frame that makes them appear suspicious. This process involves selecting and making salient specific elements of perceived reality while excluding others to promote a particular point of view (Nabi and Oliver, 2009). Familiar tropes like “being framed” are intuitively understood and taken for granted by large groups of people (Sandberg, 2016).

In his narrative, Damon Thibodeaux uses the trope of tunnel vision to describe the processes that led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment, which included 15 years in solitary confinement on death row at Louisiana’s Angola prison farm. Thibodeaux provided a false confession during the criminal justice investigation after enduring a nine-hour interrogation by police who threatened him with death by lethal injection if he did not confess. Although Thibodeaux immediately recanted, he was convicted. As Thibodeaux describes, “From after having no sleep for 36 hours and getting dug in for a nine-hour interrogation like that. I was not willing to go any longer, you know they are never going let you go ‘til you give them what they want’. So I gave them what they wanted. In my cell, I’m hoping, you know, after the investigation it is going to show that I did not do it. But you know they were trying to close the case and they got tunnel vision.”

Tunnel vision is a term of art in social science research. It refers to a set of typical heuristics and logical fallacies that prompt criminal justice system personnel to focus on an individual suspect and filter and suppress evidence to build and strengthen a case against them (Reichart, 2016). Tunnel vision is often supported by criminal-justice actors’ shared knowledge and expectations and organizational pressures, which all influence how police, prosecutors, and judges see the individuals involved in their cases (Reichart, 2016).

The narratives that the frame-up and tunnel vision invoke are both familiar in popular culture and reflect an empirical reality that is gaining widespread public recognition due to several large-scale scandals in which police systematically arrest innocent defendants (Grant, 1992; Gross, et al., 2017). Tropes like the frame-up and tunnel vision generally spark a “shock of recognition” in members of an audience and invoke an entire system of meaning upon which the imagery rests (Sandberg, 2016). In the case of both the frame-up and tunnel vision, these meanings include a profound sense of injustice (Grant, 1992). We theorize that tropes provide a narrative mechanism through which narrators can enjoy a shared experience between themselves and diverse audience members, even those who may not share similar experiences. The accessibility of these narratives, we presume also rests in the “reform” agenda that they recommend. Specifically, both the frame up and tunnel vision refer to “system variables,” factors that influence case outcomes, which the criminal justice system could change to facilitate more just results (West and Meterko, 2016). These narratives are likely widely embraced because they leave open the possibility that the wrongful convictions may be attributable to specific “bad apples” who manipulated and used evidence against them (Norris and Bonventre, 2015). Thus, the criminal justice system error can be rooted out without requiring a more socially and politically challenging approach, such as an entire overhaul or dismantling of the system.

Irony conveyed through sarcasm, metaphors, and litotes facilitates the tellability of exoneree narratives

When conveying points that push the upper boundary of narrative tellability, by either offering a radical critique of the criminal justice system or conveying unimaginable suffering, exonerees deploy figures of speech that convey irony to more palatably convey their challenging experiences and radical critique to a public audience with multi-dimensional perspectives on the criminal justice system.

Sarcasm conveys the situational irony of eyewitnesses error in wrongful conviction

Sarcasm and situational irony are evident in Kirk Bloodworth’s, narrative that highlights the role of eyewitness evidence in his wrongful conviction. Bloodsworth, who spent a total of 8 years, 11 months, and 19 days in prison, was the first person in the United States freed from death row based on DNA evidence (Innocence Project, 2020). As Bloodworth narrates, “in 1984 a little girl by the name of Dawn Hamilton was found brutally murdered in a wooded area [….] A search ensued for the killer. They described this person has 6-foot 5”, curly blonde hair, bushy mustache, tan skin, and skinny. Yeah, that’s me. My hair was as red as a fireplug. I had sideburns down to here. It was an identification witness problem. Of course, I had no idea why these people were saying this.”

Bloodworth’s narrative of eyewitness error tracks with scholarship on wrongful conviction; the majority of the roughly 375 persons exonerated based on DNA evidence after serving long prison sentences were initially convicted based on eyewitness misidentification (Albright, 2017; Findley, 2016). A central feature of Bloodworth’s narrative is a detailed description of his physical appearance. This representation echoes a rational-legal approach, which attributes wrongful conviction to calamitous but explainable human error. However, Bloodworth’s rhetoric conveys a different message. His statement, “Yeah, that’s me,” which he punctuates with a gesture to his hair and a nod, is sarcastic. A biting form of humor, sarcasm is a mocking form of rhetoric that intends to convey opposition, antagonism, and even contempt (Fine, 1994). Bloodworth’s sarcasm highlights the situational irony associated with his wrongful conviction. Bloodsworth was convicted based on eyewitness evidence even though he did not visually resemble the apparent killer. When directed to a sympathetic audience, sarcasm is a highly effective form of rhetoric that helps align the narrator and the members of his or her audience (Fine, 1994). Sarcasm may also be effective in reaching those who might find Bloodworth’s narrative untellable. As a form of humor, sarcasm softens the narrative’s most terrifying message: if a wrongful conviction can happen to Kirk Bloodworth, who is a Caucasian male and former Marine, then it can happen to anyone (Sandberg and Tutenges, 2019). The humorous rendering of the fundamental irony of Bloodworth’s conviction prompts audiences to reconsider the nature of criminal justice system error. Sarcastic rhetoric, therefore, may make the implicit critique in Bloodworth’s narrative more digestible and less threatening to a broad audience (Dickinson and Wright, 2017).

Metaphoric irony conveys criminal justice system bias

When describing their experiences, several exonerees use language that directly or indirectly calls to mind the metaphor: “justice is blind.” In text on the WTI website, exoneree Anthony Hinton, who spent 30 years on death row, eloquently explains. “They tell you justice is blind. I am telling you that justice can see. She sees what race you are, she sees where you went to college, she sees economics, she sees everything there is to see. And it all depends on what she sees, depends on whether or not you go back home or not. And when she saw me, she knew I was going to death row” (Johnson, 2015). Lady Justice, a blindfolded woman holding scales and a sword, is a widely recognized symbol of the legal system that graces criminal justice settings across the U.S. (Resnik and Curtis, 2011). Metaphors and metaphoric language involve vivid, evocative statements that associate one concept with another to which it is not applicable. The image of Lady Justice is metaphoric because it personifies justice, an abstract entity, as a person who can see and possibly be corrupted (Resnik and Curtis, 2011). There is some irony inherent in the justice is blind metaphor. In American culture, visual metaphors and rhetoric are typically used to convey clarity of observation and thought (Matusitz and Olufowote, 2016). For instance, a metaphoric expression, such as “seeing is believing” represents the stock that we put in visual evidence (Matusitz and Olufowote, 2016). Yet, Lady Justice is blindfolded, so she will not see things that may lead to partiality when meting out justice.

Although the metaphor of Lady Justice is so widely known that it constitutes a trope, exonerees like Hinton invoke the metaphor in opposition to its regular usage exposing the inherent irony of the situation. With such inversion, exonerees narratively assert their right to see the systemic roots of wrongful conviction, which include racism, class biases, the sensational portrayal of crimes in the media, and the disproportionate impact of crime control strategies on members of marginalized communities (Maidment, 2009; Mirzoeff, 2011).This bias is empirically demonstrated by research that shows young African American men are imprisoned at a rate approximately nine times that of their Caucasian counterparts (Gross et al., 2017). While African Americans comprise only 13% of the American population, the National Registry for Exonerations reports they comprise 47% of exonerations (Gross et al., 2017) a disparity likely attributable to a differential and biased administration of the law (Franklin, 2018). In such cases generally and in the specific case of exonerees, Lady Justice did not see what was readily apparent: exonerees’ innocence.

For storytellers, metaphors are generally a potent tool for building shared understanding and emotional experience, enabling narrators to strike a responsive chord with their audience (Ritchie, 2010). This is the case because, generally, metaphors prompt semantic linkages, perceptual simulations, and emotional reactions in those who hear them (Ritchie, 2010). Some even suggest that the common perceptual experience invoked by metaphors fosters a sense of unity and social bonding between not only people who share their views but also people who hold different perspectives (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Matusitz and Olufowote, 2016; Ritchie, 2010). Metaphors, in other words, generally act as a narrative bridge between narrators and their audience members. This metaphor, which is ironic and, therefore, cognitively challenging, further demands that audience members question what they know, which invites them to embrace the notion that the criminal justice system processes are inherently biased (Oswick et al., 2002). This ironic metaphor, thereby, enhances the tellability of the more politically challenging element of exonerees’ narratives.

Litotes, ironic understatement, represents the inconceivable: the experience of being sentenced to death

Exonerees also invoke representations when narrating the experience of being sentenced to death row. Randy Steidl spent 17 years in prisons, including 12 on death row after being convicted on murder charges in a case marked by corruption, police error, and false eyewitness testimony. As Steidl explains, “I spent seventeen and a half years in prison, 12 years of those were on death row in Illinois. I watched in those years twelve men be executed […] You can’t believe you just heard you were convicted of a double murder. It’s just like somebody reaches over and throws the light switch off on your life. That quick, that easy.”

This metaphoric imagery likens Steidl’s life to a light switch. With this image, Steidl is dehumanized as his life is portrayed as a kind of object. The light (Steidl’s life) does not reach a natural end. Instead, the criminal justice system decides when it will go dark. The individual who has been sentenced to death, in this framing, has been cast out of the community of persons with rights, agency, and value. Rhetorically, the phrase “turns a light off on your life” is an expression of litotes, a rhetorical device involving understatement. Throwing a light switch is a trivial action, which everyone understands. It is also a thoughtless action that requires limited reflection, not how killing someone should be conceptualized. The use of understatement draws attention to the magnitude of taking someone’s life by intentionally mislabeling the action in the opposite direction. In so doing, this rhetoric conveys the enormity of what exonerees have experienced. Still, it does so in a way that brings an incomprehensible experience down to size so audience members can recognize and digest its meaning. Like other narrators, Randy uses litotes to express unimaginable suffering and a harsh critique of the system that caused it in an indirect manner that is digestible to the audience members who hear those remarks.

Discussion

Through storytelling, exonerees may interpret and communicate their lives to make sense of their experiences and who they have become in light of them (Smith and Monforte, 2020). Also, exonerees who have an audience to bear witness to their suffering may experience a sense of comfort and even relief. However, exonerees who are working to change the criminal justice system must convey tellable stories, narratives that are acceptable and accessible to their audience members. Narrative scholarship generally suggests that whether or not a story is tellable depends on the type of person the narrator is, the socio-cultural context in which the story is told, and the content of what is said (Shuman, 2012). Despite their innocence, because exonerees have served time in prison, they may be perceived as deviant and, therefore, unreliable storytellers. Even when exonerees are accepted and even honored for their suffering, it may be hard for audience members to accept and take in their stories, which are frightening, unimaginable, and critical, revealing deep flaws in the functioning of an important social institution: the criminal justice system.

We add nuance to existing scholarship on storytelling and narrative tellability by focusing on rhetoric and figurative language based on the assumption that these culturally-coded forms of speech make it possible for narrators to convey experiences that either is hard to put into words or offers a challenging political point of view that may be hard for an audience to accept. Specifically, we find that, when they convey widely accepted critiques of criminal justice system processing, exonerees use tropes that reinforce shared understanding. When representing their unique suffering and proffering a more radical critique of the criminal justice system, exonerees marshal sarcasm, metaphor, and litotes, which convey the irony of exonerees’ circumstances. Narratives that employ irony encourage audiences to question their assumptions and even transform their views, enhancing audience receptivity to exonerees’ narratives (Watson, 1995; Wieslander, 2021). These figures of speech and rhetoric, in other words, provide a cultural framing for exonerees’ remarks, which increase their accessibility and help guide how an audience likely interprets them.

Critically, rhetorical figures like irony are not only helpful in persuading others, they also help individuals to make sense of and socially construct their own reality (Watson, 1995). As aforementioned, at the core of exonerees’ experiences is a tragic irony: they were punished despite being criminally innocent. A related irony is that exonerees are stigmatized despite their suffering and lack of guilt. Although it was beyond the scope of this paper to explore, we speculate that irony may play a unique sensemaking role for exonerees and members of other groups who do not easily fit the typical conceptions of ideal victims that figure in legal, media and political discourse (Walklate et al., 2019). Because they are innocent, exonerees do not need to narratively “make good,” as did the former prisoners in Maruna’s (2001) work. Instead, through irony, exonerees implicitly grapple with and possibly even resist the stigma they unjustly suffer. Notably, by employing figurative language in narrative representations, exonerees facilitate their personal understanding of events and better communicate it to others in ways that reflect the narrative repertoire of a particular social context as well as their own creative agency (cf. Sandberg et al., 2015).

In the preliminary analysis presented here, we only scratched the surface of our exploration of the forms of language that exonerees use to represent their experiences. Future research could fruitfully examine exoneree use of figurative vs. literal language to investigate what experiences exonerees express directly and indirectly and why. Future research could also empirically examine the questions about audience reception, which we presume in our work based on existing research and theory. Specifically, researchers could address the following questions: how receptive are audience members to exoneree narratives? How might audience members of various racial/ethnic groups differently respond to the critical messages conveyed through figurative rather than literal language? Finally, future research might also consider more fully how exonerees and/or other former prisoners use metaphor and irony since these language forms both draw audience members in but respectively imply comparisons and contrasts in ways that support or challenge a narrator’s perspective.

Individuals become invested in the narratives that they internalize, which are hard to alter. They may do so, however, when they become intensively involved in institutions that require radical self-transformation, such as prisons. Recent research speculates that individuals may similarly change their proclivities and capacities, including their narrative know-how in the context of social movement activity (Lavizzari, 2019). This perspective helps support our overall argument about the critical message associated with exonerees’ words and rhetoric. Future research could empirically investigate how exonerees take up and internalize new narratives in the context of social movement activism. Such an exploration might also consider how exonerees’ narratives shift, over time, as their institutional involvement changes (Rajah et al., 2014). Specifically, how is the story exonerees told when they were declaring their innocence to police, prosecutors, judges, juries similar to or different from the narrative that they tell to themselves and others now that their innocence has been validated through exoneration?

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Valli Rajah

Valli Rajah, PhD, is an associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. A sociologist by training, much of her research focuses on intimate partner violence (IPV) and its health consequences or correlates (e.g., substance abuse, PTSD, HIV). Drawing on critical criminology and cultural sociology, she also investigates the unintended consequences of crime-control practices and policies that marginalize and harm individuals who defy easy categorization as either “victims” or “criminal offenders,” such as drug-involved women who suffer partner violence, juveniles who were jailed while waiting for case adjudication, and individual who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes.

Christopher Thomas is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York Graduate Center.

Amy Shlosberg, PhD, is an associate professor of Criminology and Department Chair at Fairleigh Dickinson University. Her primary research focuses on miscarriages of justice, the negative implications of incarceration and issues surrounding reentry, with an emphasis on policy and procedural reform.

Sarah P Chu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York Graduate Center.

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