Truth and Crime

Narrative

Representation of event or series of events

Event

Also called story or fabula

Story neither words nor images no gestures but events situations and behaviors signified by words images and gestures

Can be factual or imagined

Must be action not static (my dog has fleas, Peter is addicted to drugs)

Must be at least one action (My dog was bitten by a flea)

Representation

Also called sjuzet

Recounting or telling of events

Can represent things from beginning middle end

Presentation (acting) vs. re-representation (telling)

Narrative Discourse

Method by which a story is told, encompassing the structure, language, and devices used to present a sequence of events, convey meaning, and engage an audience. That results in:

Two kinds of time, two kinds of order

Time of the plot, time of representation (An essay has only one temporal dimension)

Time is linear in story time

Event after event is narrative time / sequencing (can change the orders by which you construct it, police start at the end and work back, prosecutors start back to front)

Discourse Time: time in which it is represented

Cinderella

• Many ways to tell the same story, different examples different time periods

• Originally Brother's Grim 19th story collecting common household fairy tales

  • A bit more violent, the evil step sister start mutilating themselves to fit themselves

• Same story, but made into multiple narratives each with a different spin

  • You can skillfully take the same events and spin them to sound different ways

Narrativity

Sense that a story is being told

Tiny narratives don’t create narrativity

The most famous one?

“For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn”

to wear is an action, wore is a past tense past particle in statement, describing condition of shoes, not narrative here, no event, just an implication (narrativity)

Nonreferential (fictitious) narrative

“Creates the world to which it refers by referring to it.” (Dorrit Cohn )

• Does not need to refer to real world (accurately).

• Is unverifiable and complete

• If you are creating all the events, it ought not to have gaps

• One thing, we can speculate, write fan fic, have questions

Referential (Nonfiction) narrative

Is subject to judgments of truth or falsity

• Affirms accuracy and does not claim knowledge of what cannot be known (like thoughts)

•Is verifiable and incomplete

How do we know if it’s fiction or nonfiction?

No textual property that will identify a text as a work as nonfiction

Especially True for wrongful conviction

Signpost of Fictionality

BiLevel structure:

Presentation of Consciousness:

Doubling of the Narrating Instance:

Bi-Level Structure (Signpost of fictionality)

Fiction separates the level of the story (the events told) from the level of the discourse (how the story is told) in a self-contained way. Factual/historical writing must anchor the story to a third level: an external historical record.

Presentation of Consciousness

Fiction can represent inner thoughts, feelings, and private consciousnesses of characters without proof or mediation

Doubling of the Narrating Instance

Doubling of the Narrating Instance: Fiction splits the voice telling the story into two distinct entities: the real-world author and the internal narrator (who can even be unreliable)

In false convictions, who is the one talking?

This is in conflict with feeling of factual representation

How are lawyers like historians

Developing meaning from facts: levels of conceptualization in the “historical work”

Chronicle - Story - Emplotment

Legal Imagination

The legal language system [includes] not only peculiar and technical phrases but habits of thought and conditions of mind, for it is language that demonstrates the condition of the imagination.

The lawyer is at heart a writer, one who lives by the power of his imagination.

Narrative Contestation

How stories are told in court As such, a trial can be described as a huge, unpolished narrative compendium featuring the contest of two sets of authors, each trying to make their central narrative of events prevail by spinning narrative segments for their rhetorical impact.”

Structure : Beginning, middle, end

Normalization

Normalization

Narrative makes things normal for us, makes them plausible and “belong”

Post hoc ergo propter hoc, (“After this therefore because of this”)

Human desire for causation, supported byexperience

Framing / Frame Narrative

Introductory main story for the purpose of setting the stage for organizing a set of shorter stories

Narrative Satellites

Narratives that never make it into the sphere of judicially acceptable evidence.

Shadow Narratives / Stories

Story/Narrative that is incomplete, missing key elements (“Shadow of possible worlds”)

Paratext

Narrative not allowed to be part of the long narrative the jury hears

Reflexive Narratives

Dynamic narrative of trial itself

Motives

Fills narrative gaps

Narrativizing Personality (motive alone doesn't help)

Caveat: Civil and Criminal Courts; mens rea and motive

Master Plot

Recurrent skeletal stories, told over and over again (Cinderella—neglect, injustice, rebirth). Masterplots tend to create credibility (46), Rodney King, O.J. Simpson)

Cultural Masterplots

Cultural backgroun

Type

Recurring type of character

Genre

Recurrent literary form (Epic, tragedy, essay (nonnarrative)

Digesis

The total fictional world of a story, including its characters, events, spaces; the relaying of information in a fictional work (such as a film or novel) through a narrative

Telling of a story, the relaying of information in a (fictional) work (such as a film or novel) through a narrative with a narrator

Mimesis

Showing, not telling, directly represented, actin

Diegetic

Elements experienced by both the characters and the audience (like dialogue or a radio playing in a scene)

Non Diegetic

Elements that only the audience experiences (like background mood music or a voiceover narrator)

Homodiegetic narrator

A character within the story tells their story

Heterodiegetic narrator

Narrator who is NOT a character in the story but in a way hovers above it and knows everything about it
Relationship to others:

• A heterodiegetic narrator is a type of intradiegetic narrator if they are a character but not the protagonist. However, often when used, it is meant as a separate category referring to the narrator's role in the story.

Extradiegetic Level

External to (not part of) any diegesis. Narrator's level, the level at which exists a narrator who is not part of the story being told. Narrator who is not part of the story universe. Outside Narrator

Police? Probably metadiegetic (they tell through suspects)

• Prosecutor

Intradiegetic level

Level of the characters, their thoughts and actions. Narrator inside the story

Interviews

Metadiegetic/ hypodiegetic level

Diegesis that is embedded in another one and is often understood as a story within a story, as when a diegetic narrator tells a story.

Extradiegetic Narrator Example

The narrator in a frame story who tells the story being told by a character within the story is extradiegetic, as they are on a separate "level" of narration.

Intradiegetic Example

A narrator who is a character within the story they are narrating is intradiegetic. John Watson, the narrator in Sherlock Holmes, is an intradiegetic narrator because he is part of the story world.

Narrative Blueprint

A preordained mold of a legal story that every criminal justice system provides.

•What acts are criminalized (substantive criminal law) and what are their doctrinal elements? [Today]

•How is proving those elements regulated (procedural criminal law)?

[Next Lecture]

•Rules of evidence

•Who is the fact-finder (judge or jury)?

Deviance

behavior that violates social norms and arouses negative social reactions.

Examples: Lateness, rudeness, wearing inappropriate (or no) clothing

Crime

behavior that is considered so serious that it violates formal laws prohibiting such behavior. (any behavior can be mae a crime )

Elements of a Crime

Actus rea with concurrence of men's rea leading to Causation of Harm

Actus Rea

Human Conduct / act / event the law prohibits

1. Speech

2. Attempt

3. Doing vs. Being (can’t be punished for a state of being)

4. Failure to act can be conduct

Voluntariness (or: controllability) Not a reflex

• Something your brain controls, does the person in the getaway car have ability Yes we do have actus Rea

• Even if forced, if someone is making us do something, you still have actus rea

  • We have a defense for this, coersion / under duress, so some states have a certain thing about it

• What if we are tricked

  • WE didn't have the men's rea / intent, she was mistaken (mistake of fact) could be negligence

True Crime Relevance of Actus Rea

True crime narratives may dramatize or reconstruct acts with creative license

Mens Rea

State of Mind, Blameworthiness, “Guilty Mind”that accompanies a criminal act

•It is complex

•Varies by crime

Degrees

Purpose

Knowledge

• Knows my actions will have consequence

• Someone bringing in peanut butter, doesn't want anyone die but knows if I do this (leaving cookie with peanut in front) a kid might die with a certainty

Recklessness

Knowing there was a risk but did it anyway, don't know it was certain but know it was a risk

Negligence

If speeding in school zone (but not during time, only at night) weren't awary of risk of hitting kid (it's 3 am) but you ought to be aware

How about motive? Strict Liability

True Crime Relevance of Mens Rea

rue crime infers or simplifies state of mind; mixes motive with intent

Is motive intent

• Motive: Why you are doing something, the motivation behind commiting a crime (robbing bank for thrill, vs rich, vs car)

  • Law is not really about this, but juries love it

• Intent is directed at specific crime (for specific actus rea) proof that this person at this time wanted to threaten a person in order to get a financial benefit

Concurrance

Actus rea and Mens Rea MUST occcur at same time

A is late for work, drives too fast while checking texts. He hits B on the crosswalk. B dies. A realizes he had wanted to kill B for a long time. [At the time of the act, intent to kill was not established; [dolus subsequens.] (NOT MURDER)

Causation

Causal Link between an actor’s conduct and result?

Factual Causation: But for actor’s conduct, harm would not have occured

Not given when, no proof for connection, action was no substantive in causing harm

Legal Causation: Limit scope of factual causation, intervening cause (novus actus interveniens), new intervening event breaks chain of causation (humang agency, natural causes)

Forseeabiity: actor is liable for the forseeable but not the unforeseeable consequence of his or her act

Exception: Parents charged with crime of child exception to human agnecy breaking connection

True Crime RElevance of Causation

Post Hoc ergo propter hoc phenomenon “after this, therefor because of this”

• just because it happens in sequence, may not have been the act that caused the harm

• Casuality is a vital

Harm

Loss, disadvantage or injury to victim

Inchoate Crimes

Crime of preparing for or seeking to commit another crime

Defenses

Defense is a factor that justifies or excuses the actor's responsibility

•Justification: The act itself is not wrong (Self-Defense)

•Excuse: The actor cannot be held (fully) accountable (insanity, young age, intoxication)

Substantive Criminal Law

Defines the crime

Relies on statutes (legislation)

Procedural Criminal Law

Defines how the official crime “story” may be investigated and constructed

Limitations of state power

•Relies on courts (precedent)

Set of rules governing the process by which criminal law is implemented by the various government agencies

(can't torture people confessions, need miranda warnings)

It balances two goals of the criminal justice system: public safety and individual rights

What makes a criminal law

Deviance an evil: behavior that departs from the norm and sets people for social status

Must be specific (no apparent purpose is not specific)

True Crime Relevance of the composition of criminal law

People might be deviant, unsympathetic, obnoxious, etc., but that does not mean they commit crimes, nor does it mean it is o.k. do use crime as pretext.

Burden of Proof

Prosecutors carry the weight of proving every statutory element.

• Jury find guilty or not guilty (not innocent) checking to see if that burden is being met

• There is no contest of narratives because too many factors

  • Prosecutors have to set up a cohesive narrative hitting that standard, defense just has to break that down

Standard

Reasonable suspicion

PROBABLE CAUSE

Beyond reasonable doubt

True Crime Relevance of Burden of Proof

True crime media often highlights sensational aspects, speculation, or emotional angles that do not meet strict legal thresholds

Reasonable Suspicion

Required for traffic stops and "stop and frisks.

Probable Cause

Required to conduct a search, make an arrest, or obtain a warrant

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

No other logical explanation that defendant committed that crime; not 100% absolute certainty, but rather a moral certainty or a firm, reasoned conviction of guilt.

True Crime relevance of Standards of Proof

True crime media emphasizes or deemphasizes certain aspects that do not correspond to legal standard.

Admissible Evidence

Trials rely on rules of evidence and constitutional protections

•Hearsay Prohibition: Out-of-court statement offered by a witness to prove the truth of the matter asserted

•Illegal searches

Multiple, lesser-known rules:

Chain of custody (tracking physical items like weapons or biological samples (like DNA) from a crime scene to a forensics lab.)

True Crime Relevance of Admissible Evidence

True crime entertainment includes unverified rumors, online theories, and biased accounts excluded from a real courtroom

Sources of Criminal Procedure

The Bill of Rights: Criminal justice process is governed by reasonable and lawful procedures

It is the “minicode of criminal procedure”

•Restriction of governmental action

•Over time, Bill of Rights became incorporated into state law

•Procedural law is shaped by courts

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or thing to be seized.

Binds government agents, not private people

•Journalists

•Podcasters

•Suspicious room mates

•Influencers

Police Procedural

subgenre of crime fiction / detective fiction and drama and drama, focuses on meticulous, step by step process of police investigations, rather than solely on the crime or the criminal

Stories often provide a behind the scenes look at plce work, including daily routines, procedures, and challenges faced by law enforcement officers

Increasingly complex and organized nature of contemporary American society has resulted in the proliferation of new types of crime

Relies more on realistic and authentic representation of police and their work in real life

Detective of the police procedural relies on the departmental procedures of police force and their xexperience

History of Police Procedural

Think Oedipus Rex, Cain and Abel, Hamlet

Late 19th and early 20th

The birth of the detective: Earlier detective stories focused on private or amateur sleuths like Sherlock Holmes

Wilkie Collins' 1868 novel The Moonstone is often cited as one of the first police procedurals.

Post - War Realism

American films dramatized real crimes with a new sense of

authenticity (on location)

• The Naked City (1948) and He Walked by Night (1948), establish

new visual and narrative styles for depicting police work

• Lawrence Treat's 1945 novel, V as in Victim, is often identified as

the first true police procedural in print.

• In 1956, mystery critic Anthony Boucher coined the term "police

procedural" in a review, acknowledging it as a distinct subgenre.

20th Century

Dragnet era (1950s): The TV procedural is born: Inspired by the semi-documentary films, Jack Webb created the radio series Dragnet in 1949, which moved to television in 1951. Dragnet is arguably the most famous and influential police procedural of all time.

Shifting perceptions (1980s): Hill Street Blues (1981–1987) introduced a new level of moral complexity and realism to the genre.

• Handheld cameras

• Overlapping, serialized story arcs

• Police officers are portrayed as flawed, human characters struggling with bureaucracy, addiction, and racism in a decaying city

The modern era (1990s–present)

Law & Order and the dual narrative: Beginning in 1990, Law & Order innovated the procedural format by splitting each episode into two distinct halves: a police investigation and a legal prosecution.

• CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–2015) popularized the use of cutting-edge forensic technology. The show created the "CSI effect."

Markers of Police Procedure

Emphasis on Investigation

Realistic Portrayal of Police Work

Focus on Process

Story Engine

Emphasis on Investigation (Marker of Police Procedure)

The core of the story lies in the detailed investigation of a crime, often following detectives as they gather evidence, interview witnesses, and analyze clues.

Realistic Portrayal of Police Work (Marker of Police Procedure)

Police procedurals aim for realism, depicting the practicalities of police work, including the use of forensic science, legal procedures, and the challenges of maintaining order.

Focus on Process (Marker of Police Procedure)

The narrative often centers on the process of solving a crime, with less focus on the emotional or personal lives of the characters compared to other mystery subgenres.

Story Engine (Marker of Police Procedural)

A crucial element is the "story engine," which includes the series format, compelling characters, and overarching themes explored through the weekly cases.

Why are Police Procedures Popular

Relatability: Readers and viewers can often relate to the characters' dedication, challenges, and the everyday aspects of police work.

Escapism: They offer a glimpse into a world that many viewers are unfamiliar with, providing both

entertainment and a sense of understanding.

Technical Accuracy: Some viewers appreciate the attention to detail and realistic depiction of police procedures.

Story Engine: The episodic format with a self-contained case each week, coupled with engaging

characters, makes for a compelling and repeatable viewing or reading experience

What makes it true crime

true story, introducing original footage and documents, reenactments blended seamlessly, fictionalization

Prolepsis

Call forwards to what happen, kinda like foreshadowing

Evoking in advance an event that will take place later

Foreshadowing and repeated references to the Clutters' murders before they occur. (We know but the Clutters don’t)

“unaware that it would be his last”, “It was the dress in which she was to be buried”, “Now, on this final day of her life”

Value of True Crime

speaks to our ambivalence over consuming real-life tales of horror.

What is that ambivalence according to Burger?

It’s distasteful

Rich history shows that there is more to true crime than blood-spattered paperbacks

Thread

True crime can be seen as a reflection of narrative agency (God, government, courts, people)

•From Providence/divine judgment to investigation and participatory trials

•From execution sermons to journalistic accounts

•From both to True Crime as it exists today

Big Picture summary of true crime

From public hangings and puritan execution sermons in the 17th century to …

• the printing of those sermons and the development of a lucrative genre.

• Sensationalized accounts that then developed into literary alternatives to sermons

(conversion narratives, execution accounts, trial reports, newspaper stories, crime

ballads) after 1730

• Trial reports

• Newspaper coverage

• Puritan social order gradually evolved into conflicted and cosmopolitan milieu.

• Accounts of sexual exploits show the genre’s gradual drift away from the realm of

spiritual biography, toward a form of documentary biography; shift from pious

confessions to secular autobiographies

• Shift from ministers to printers as chief mediators

• By first half of 19th century journalistic accuracy weakened, Penny Press (1830s) and

“casual consumption”

• Fewer execution sermons and dying speeches, more “factual coverage”—hand in had

with an evolved criminal trial (drama in itself); Lawyers of the early republic saved lives

where clergymen had once saved souls

• True Detective and capitalism

• Nonfiction as literary art (Capote)

• Social Media discourses

Beginning Perception of True Crime

Murder will out!

Bible and Quar’an

Cain kills abel out of jealousy

4th or even 6th century BCE

•“Your brother's blood cries out to me from the soil.”

•“Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer sevenfold vengeance.

We have old testament and biblical old law "You must not..."

Where do they come form

Guilt cannot be left undealt with

Early Beginnings of True Crime

Plato: “The virtuous man is content to dream what a wicked man really does.”

Durkheim: seeing the criminal convicted creates a sense of solidarity among law-abiding citizens

“There is a certain grim pleasure in the circumstance -- a perpetual jingling antithesis between life and death, that is sure of its effect.” (Thackery)

• This requires knowing of the crimes

• America provided fertile ground for true narratives of crime.

• First popular form such accounts took was the Puritan execution sermon

Execution Sermons

By the 17th and 18th centuries, execution sermons were the predominant form of criminal narratives in the New England Colonies.

• Delivered right before the hanging

• Individual was referred to as "sinner" or “condemned”

• Guiding assumption: Murder will out! Never a question of guilt

Crime seen as a failure of the community

Early sermons rarely mentioned the crime committed.

•Smaller sins (unclean lifestyles and disobedience) ultimately led up to the bigger sin of murder.

•“Let Every one be Warned by this Example to take heed to themselves and beware of Every thing that may tend to pave the way to this Crime.

Used to create empathy

•It is no fault to have Compassion upon such malefactors and minister to their Necessities and Comfort, during the Time they are permitted to Live.

•Criminal was made an exemplar, everyone is capable of murder

•Crime itself was merely an “awful occasion” for the preaching of Calvinist doctrine

•Sermons were oral but then were printed and sold as pamphlets and sometimes later collected in book form. Some, like Cotton Mather's Pillars of Salt, became early American best selle

19th Century (True Crime Relevance)

Crime as a site of social, aesthetic, and scientific inquiry

Criticism of justice system

De Quincey articulates his aesthetics of murder. He does not condone violence or make moral claims, but instead compares the effect of murder to Kant’s theory of the sublime Early precursor to In Cold Blood.

19th century criminology shaped public’s interest in true crime mysteries (The general momentum of the 19th century)

The murder mystery was a by-product of the new legal discourse on crime that was replacing the earlier theological discourse.

New understanding of the crime as fundamentally resistant to full knowledge, moral comprehension, and narrative closure

What happened in the sciences affected the public (and literary) discourse: the notion of the inspector

Kant’s Theory of the Sublime

(=attribute of the mind and not of nature)

An aesthetic quality of greatness and exceeding normal human measurement

and understanding.

Kant: The noble, the splendid, and the terrifying

Murder Most Foul

On the surface, the story of an investigation is narrated, while on another level, the hidden story of the crime is brought to light.

To See a Man Hanged

Hanging of 1840 Francois Courvoisier in 1840 outside the Newgate Prison for the crime of murdering his employer

• Public spectacle, 40,000 people gathered

•Thackery and “X” witnessed

Good humor at first, making “appropriate jokes about the coming event.”

Galgenhumor / Gallow’s Humor

• Thackeray’s apprehension heightened

• Thackeray broke down at the sight of the gallows and had his

eyes shut through the execution

• “I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done”

• “I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and that I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.”

• I pray it may soon be out of the power of any man in England to witness such a hideous and degrading sight.

Galgenhumor / Gallow’s Humor

“Really the time passed away with extraordinary quickness. A thousand things of the sort related here came to amuse us. First he workmen knocking and hammering at the scaffold…”

Adversarialism

Before mid-eighteenth century, Anglo-American criminal trial was not adversarial (“judge-dominated inquest”)

The purposes served by the trial were to convince spectators of the defendant's guilt

Right to counsel, beginning 1701 in Pennsylvania

Effects of Adversarial Trial

Moral uncertainty about the nature of the crime and the assignment of guilt

Legal truth through formal argument rather than inquisitorial determination

Trial reports provided narrative which connected ”events” with “evidence”

Lawyers developed techniques for helping the jury to retain, organize, and interpret the chaotic stream of information

Courtroom language framed the process of deductive reasoning from the evidence

The new murder mystery required that readers play an active role in shaping the narrative and assigning guilt for the crime.

•Execution sermons had required only that readers accept on clerical (and ultimately divine) authority their official version of a unified and uncontestable truth. But the new legal narratives effectively treated readers as jurors who had to take an active role in crafting the murder narrative

Criminalistics

The application of scientific methods and techniques to recognize, collect, identify, and analyze physical evidence from a crime scene

Modern True Crime: True Detective

First issue 1924 (circulation 2 million)

•Many imitators

•Narrative following the police step-by-step through their investigation of the crime, and climaxing with the apprehension of the suspect

•Focus on murder

Winters V New York

Determined True Crime had not possible value for society in magazines but are entitled to the protection of free speech as the best literature

1960s - 1990s in True Crime

1966: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

1974: Bugliosi and Gentry's Helter Skelter: The Story of the

Manson Murders

1980: Ann Rule, The Stranger Beside Me

1970s - 1990s: Televised criminal trials

○ 1979: Ted Bundy

○ 1992: Jeffrey Dahmer

○ 1994: O.J. Simpson

Podcasts and Streaming

Internet with its participatory abilities inmitated a new fast growing wave of true crime

We have become a nation of violent crime pseudo-experts with many ordinary people able to speak intelligently about blood spatter patterns and serial killers

In Cold Blood

•Explores the murder of the Clutter family in 1959 in rural Holcomb, Kansas

Published 1965/66 (4 years of investigation), first as a series of articles in The New Yorker

A “nonfiction” novel

No strict linear progression. Narrative loops backward and forward in time

Spent time on characters every day

“Nonfiction” Novel

“A narrative form that employed all the techniques of fictional art but was nevertheless immaculately factual.”

What kind of narrator is In Cold blood

Narrator is not a (visible) character in the story but knows everything

•Heterodiegetic

•Narrator is not participating:

•Extradiegetic

Analepsis

Past event is narrated at a point later than its chronological place in a story

Mainly used to learn about Smith and Hickock: Perry’s abuse: “What she used to do, she’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put me in it, and hold me under till I was blue