The Trial of Alice Clifton: Judicial Catharsis in Institutional Bias

• Main Author: Zaugg, Gary
• Format: Others
• Published: North Dakota State University 2018
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10365/27457

This is a critical introduction and rhetorical analysis of a moment of criminal crisis at a time of profound institutional bias: the 1787 infanticide trial of a young Philadelphia slave and rape victim named Alice Clifton. A dramatistic view of the case—in the tradition of Kenneth Burke—reveals the law’s inherent symbolic action in shaping social reality and its cathartic potential when resolving conflict and judging conduct. Judicial catharsis—the official apparatus for channeling the manifold cathartic pathways that converge upon a criminal crisis—is the procedural and ritualistic dramatism of the law. It provides the serial victimage necessary to feed the insatiable appetite of symbolicity’s categorical guilt. Accused persons stand for, or stand in for, generalized fears and tensions on the assumption that labeling and punishing them somehow remediates past events or external conditions. In that sense, the community treats criminals for its own benefit. Whether convicting or acquitting, punishing or pardoning, acting upon a defendant tends to purify the group. But ritual-induced unity is more of a temporary diversion of collective attention than a persistent change in collective attitudes or social conditions. Institutional bias—such as slavery or disparate treatment of unwed mothers—politicizes judicial catharsis by creating underlying circumstantial guilt that cannot be directly discharged through criminal adjudication. Nor is catharsis through judgment the same thing as justice; the ritualistic sacrifice of a scapegoat can bring a false sense of redemption to the community by masking bias and social division. Thus, the rhetoric of the law is compensatory, not curative—a perpetual cleansing of what can never be made clean. In the case of Alice Clifton, the law required a criminal scapegoat and the privileged hierarchy required a political scapegoat. To serve as both, the respective burdens had to be reshaped to match the scapegoat’s back. By condemning and then pardoning—symbolically taking her to the edge of death and then restoring her to life—the process hybridized the resolution, staking claim to the awesome power of justice and mercy to reaffirm the existing social order.