Trial evidence: overt and covert communication in court

Abstract

This paper isolates and discusses some strategies that are involved in the examination and cross‐examination techniques used in the adversarial system of a criminal trial in the U.S., with material drawn from the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald. I argue that communication in the courtroom cannot be described in terms of traditional discourse analysis, since the real communication takes place not between the speakers, but between counsel and jury. Semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features are examined in order to explain how counsel establish credibility for themselves and their witnesses, and how they use particular question types to achieve calculated responses from witnesses, which are again used to flash meta‐messages to the judge and jury.