This dissertation explores the means through which language and culture make death penalty decisions possible – how specific language choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. More specifically, it investigates how discursive constructions of place and space are mobilized within trial participants' argumentation and reasoning about death penalty decisions; grammatical and semantic forms as both facilitating and stymying empathic and emotional experiences; and how language mediates jurors' understandings and judgments about agency and culpability, regarding both defendants' criminal actions and their own sentencing decisions. In conclusion, it argues that language is one of the primary resources by which jurors construct defendants as non-human and thus decide to sentence them to death.;The dissertation research involved twelve months of fieldwork, from 2009-2010, in and around Houston, Texas for data collection. The methodologies included interviews of jurors, attorneys, judges, and prison staff, participant-observation in death penalty trials; audio-recordings and note-taking of these trials; and qualitative linguistic analyses of transcribed interviews and courtroom interaction.;The overall analysis reveals that language is crucial in the making and unmaking of defendants into human beings, acts often described by theorists of law and language as violent. The dissertation argues that language mediates a central tension and source of violence in death penalty trials, between encounters with the face of another human being and the discursive, institutional making of that being. Overcoming this tension is crucial to jurors being able to sentence a defendant to death.
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