“Warnings are to be given if feasible” : Graduating power in the US state laws on the use of force by law enforcement
Seppälä, Mila (2017-12-12)
“Warnings are to be given if feasible” : Graduating power in the US state laws on the use of force by law enforcement
Seppälä, Mila
(12.12.2017)
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Turun yliopisto
Tiivistelmä
Cases of young unarmed black American men being fatally shot by police officers and their subsequent acquittals are increasingly raising questions about the ethos of the current US state statutes that govern the use of force by law enforcement. This thesis aims to examine the places of power in these statutes in order to determine how restrictive or non-restrictive they are. Furthermore, it is questioned whether the legislative is structured in such a way that binds the judiciary to decisions of acquittals or if the judiciary system itself is partial to systematically favoring the law enforcement. This thesis argues that while the judiciary seems to be reluctant to find police officers guilty, power is indeed allocated in the statutes to the law enforcement in such a way that it restricts the regulating power of the courts.
This thesis approaches the issue from primarily linguistic point of view and focus is given to the semantics of particularly dominant words in the statutes. Corpus and qualitative methods are combined to analyze the structure of 41 statutes with codes on use of force by law enforcement as well as how power is being allocated in them. Graduation from appraisal framework by Martin and White (2005) and Hood (2006) is used to study how power is being allocated to the legal subject of the laws while concepts of vagueness and specificity in legislative writing (Bhatia et al. 2005) are utilized to establishes how much and in what ways the laws restricts the courts.
As a critical discourse analysis, this thesis aims to expose the legitimization of institutional power abuse over a minority group as well as locating possibilities for rectifying this situation. While recognizing that there are fundamentally ideological aspects that drive this inequality embedded in the institutional structures of the US, alternatives that promote change are presented for bill drafters, for Supreme Court decisions as well as training in local police departments.
This thesis approaches the issue from primarily linguistic point of view and focus is given to the semantics of particularly dominant words in the statutes. Corpus and qualitative methods are combined to analyze the structure of 41 statutes with codes on use of force by law enforcement as well as how power is being allocated in them. Graduation from appraisal framework by Martin and White (2005) and Hood (2006) is used to study how power is being allocated to the legal subject of the laws while concepts of vagueness and specificity in legislative writing (Bhatia et al. 2005) are utilized to establishes how much and in what ways the laws restricts the courts.
As a critical discourse analysis, this thesis aims to expose the legitimization of institutional power abuse over a minority group as well as locating possibilities for rectifying this situation. While recognizing that there are fundamentally ideological aspects that drive this inequality embedded in the institutional structures of the US, alternatives that promote change are presented for bill drafters, for Supreme Court decisions as well as training in local police departments.