Bellow Scholars Program Report on Projects: Rachel Goldberg, Cornell Law School (with Sandra Babcock and Allison Koenecke): Analyzing Women’s Capital Trials for Gender-Biased Language

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Session Type: Bellow Scholars

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Waterview A

Floor: Lobby Level

This project seeks to show how courtroom actors express gender bias in the criminal trials of women facing the death penalty. It uses innovative and interdisciplinary qualitative and computational methods to explore and identify gender-biased language deployed in women’s capital trials. Our team—which includes co-principal investigators Sandra Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, and Allison Koenecke, Assistant Professor of Information Science at Cornell University—has found that legal actors frequently invoke biased tropes in women’s criminal trials, including those of hypersexualization, deficient mothering, and emotional manipulation. In the next phase of the project, we will expand our dataset to analyze the capital trials of all women currently on death row in the United States and compare them to a subset of trials for men sentenced to death. The objective is that this research will have far-reaching impacts on the legal system’s understanding of how gendered discourses are deployed against women in the legal system—especially against those facing the harshest sentences.