A Critical Perspective on Testimonial Injustice: Interrogating Witnesses' Credibility Excess in Criminal Trials
A Comment on Federico Picinali's "Evidential Reasoning, Testimonial Injustice and the Fairness of the Criminal Trial"
Abstract
This paper offers a critical race theory perspective on the testimonial injustice experienced by racially minoritized criminal defendants in evidential practice. It builds off Federico Picinali’s paper, inter alia, substantiating how minoritized criminal defendants experience testimonial harm through credibility deficit, by exploring epistemic injustice to the same when prosecutorial witnesses receive identity-based credibility excess. It argues that in an adversarial criminal legal system, the testimonial injustice of credibility excess afforded racial in-group prosecutorial witnesses should be considered in tandem with the testimonial injustice of credibility deficit imposed on racial out-group defendants. Only then can the epistemic harm and resultant unfairness at trial for defendants be fully assessed. The paper advocates for expanding the definition of testimonial injustice to encompass the epistemic wrong of socially biased credibility excess and “transferred epistemic harm.” In instances of transferred epistemic harm, the harm inflicted by an epistemic wrong impacts the speaker’s interlocutor rather (or more) than the speaker themselves.
Keywords
epistemic injustice, Testimonial Injustice, critical race theory, Evidential reasoning, Criminal trialsReferences
Bufkin, S. (2024). Racism, Epistemic Injustice, and Ideology Critique, Philosophy and Social Criticism. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 50(6), 1-25.
Burlando-Salazar, J. (2023). Preventing the Epistemic Harm of Testimonial Injustice in Law Witness Credibility Assessments. Boston University Law Review, 103(4), 1245-1285.
Capers, B. (2019). Evidence Without Rules. Notre Dame Law Review, 94(2), 867-908.
David, E. (2016). Typecasts, Tokens, and Spokespersons: A Case for Credibility Excess as Testimonial Injustice. Hypatia, 31(3), 486-496.
Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.
Gonzales Rose, J. (2017). Toward a Critical Race Theory of Evidence. Minnesota Law Review, 101, 2243-2311.
Lackey, S. (2023). Criminal Testimonial Injustice. Oxford University Press.
Lee, H. (1960). To Kill A Mockingbird. J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Medina, J. (2011). The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary. Social Epistemology, 25(1), 15-35.
Picinali, F. (2023). Evidential reasoning, testimonial injustice and the fairness of the criminal trial. Quaestio facti. Revista internacional sobre Razonamiento Probatorio, 6, 201-235. https://revistes.udg.edu/quaestio-facti/article/view/22888
Ralph. A.E. (2024). Qualified Immunity, Legal Narrative, and the Denial of Knowledge. Boston College Law Review, 65(4), 1317-1380.
Tuerkheimer, D. (2017). Incredible Women: Sexual Violence and the Credibility Discount. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 166(1), 1-58.
Washington L. (2022). Survived & Coerced: Epistemic Injustice in the Family Regulation System. Columbia Law Review, 122(4), 1097-1164.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.33115/udg_bib/qf.i7.23043Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Jasmine Gonzales Rose
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.