Chapter 23
In: Sights, Sounds, and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecutions
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Abstract
In criminal prosecutions and trials of elderly defendants accused of international crimes and atrocities, an ‘asymmetry’ of the communicative event arises as between the parties. This is generated by the inordinately old age of the accused, who is frequently beset with health problems. This asymmetry can be explored from the perspective of a communicative and speech-act inspired theory of law. However, it can also be explored from the perspective of modern argumentation theory by employing notions such as the so-called visual arguments and the concept of multimodal argumentation. The following study outlines how the visualities of elderly defendants in such trials can be conceived as arguments. This study elaborates possible benefits of such an approach for the exploration of the asymmetry, a phenomenon that the author has studied from a communicative point of view elsewhere. The author concludes that the struggle to preserve a structural-formal balance in the types of arguments used in such trials offers an alternative in order to maintain, as much as possible, the adversarial symmetry of the criminal trial as a communicative event.