‘Life or Death Confusion’

Linguistics Prof. Lakoff’s criticism of the imprecise instructions given jurors and their life-and-death consequences inadvertently reminds us why American justice is a failure in the minds of so many Americans. A judge’s instructions to a jury are correctly ambiguous to the extent that allows that jury to exercise its authority.

It was not the intention of our forefathers to create a system of justice whereby instructions to the peers of the accused were so specific as to preclude the jury’s ability to exercise its own good judgment, regardless of the minutiae that have come to outweigh the broader sense of justice in our courtrooms.

Defense attorneys long ago realized the power of words in forcing a jury to focus on other than the overriding circumstances of a case in order to comply with the law. Lakoff himself makes no apology for ignoring the facts of the case in question (the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl) in order to focus on whether the judge should use “shall” or “may” when instructing the jury.

What incenses so many Americans is that our system of justice has been reduced to a “Semantics Bowl,” rather than a forum where citizens pass judgment on the alleged misdeeds of their peers. That the legal community, which writes and administers most of our laws, has seen fit to exclude the will of so many Americans from day-to-day justice by engaging in “word games” of the type Lakoff describes, was not the intention of our forefathers, nor does it augur well for our contemporary social fabric.

NEIL HOKANSON

Olivenhain, Calif.