Discourse analysis of the methodology and argumentation used in court cases by the judges to give their verdicts

Abstract:

Judges in Ecuador give their verdicts after a detailed examination of facts and inquiries pertaining to a case. They analyze complete processes where attorneys present their arguments based on the description of their thesis. These attorneys’ arguments are mostly casuistic and manipulative. The level of manipulative argumentation depends on the type of proceedings applied to criminal or civil cases. Thus, judges use different methodologies and arguments based on their own experience and on other similar court cases to declare verdicts. In reference to this research, there are important previous studies like the one made by Kayam, O. & Galily, Y.(2014) about figurative language in court. Light, J. & McNaughton, D.(2014) describe the communicative competence that includes judgment and skills. De la Rosa, P. & Sandoval, V.(2016) analyze some details of judges’ physiological processes when making a decision in a trial. Pfautz, M.(2015) focuses on quantifying the error rate in verdicts. The goal of this study is to identify, classify and analyze the different kinds of methodologies and argumentation strategies used to declare verdicts based on the judicial dialogue. A multi-method approach is used to analyze information in a qualitative and quantitative way which includes the logical, the rhetorical, dialogical and a pragma-dialectic approach that refers Feteris, E.(2009). Interviews of 5 different attorneys and 5 different judges took place as well as an analysis of 20 verdicts. The findings suggest that the 80% of verdicts have a nonstructured schema which makes the verdict text confusing. On that basis, it can be noticed that judges’ verdicts are not …

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