Social Construction of Motive and Membership Categorization

DOI

Bibliographic Information

Other Title
  • 犯行動機の構成と成員カテゴリー化実践
  • いわゆる「足利事件」における精神鑑定をめぐって
  • On Psychiatric Assessment in the "Ashikaga Case"

Description

The purpose of this paper is to explicate the logic through which intelligibility of a murder case is achieved in the trial of the so-called "Ashikaga Case" from the perspective of ethnomethodologically informed constructionism. In May 1990, a four year old girl went missing and was found murdered. Mr. S was arrested as a suspect in the case and then prosecuted. In the first instance, he admitted his guilt and there was no apparent disagreement as to whether he had killed the girl. He was categorized as a "pedophile" in psychiatric assessment, which made it accountable that he had the motive for the crime. But, after having received a verdict of guilty, he appealed to a higher court and affirmed that he was innocent. Although, during the appeal hearing, there is explicit disagreement as to whether he had committed the crime, motive attribution and membership categorization having done in the first instance still made it accountable that he was the murderer. Building bridges between C. W. Mills' ideas about vocabularies of motive and ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis originated from H. Sacks, our focus is on the reflexive constitutive relation between membership category and motive as its predicate. And also, we try to empirically point out the problems with the usage of psychiatric assessment in court and its consequence.

Journal

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

  • CRID
    1390001205786937472
  • NII Article ID
    110006153645
  • DOI
    10.20621/jjscrim.28.0_68
  • ISSN
    24241695
    0386460X
  • Text Lang
    ja
  • Data Source
    • JaLC
    • CiNii Articles
  • Abstract License Flag
    Disallowed

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