The ‘worst of the worst’: punitive justice frames in criminal sentencing clips on YouTube

ABSTRACT

Courtroom media is a longstanding genre of news and entertainment, in radio, film, television, and print. Digital streaming platforms such as YouTube, which boasts over 2 billion users, have become a prominent source of courtroom content. In this research, I examine popularized YouTube sentencing clips: fairly short videos (often no more than a few minutes) which generally include a sentence-reaction formula, have little context (case, social, or individual), and are digitally shared, edited, and distributed online, primarily by news outlets and private channels. Specifically, I conduct a frame analysis of 53 sentencing clips from United States’ courtrooms. I find that sentencing clips reinforce dominant punitive justice frames, including justice-as-retribution, justice-as-victim-advocacy, and justice-as-entertainment. Moreover, as the majority of clips feature defendants sentenced for violent acts, including sexual assault, murder, and child abuse, they depict the ‘worst of the worst’ being brought to justice. Thus, in a time of criminal justice reform, of which there has been popular concern regarding the ‘relatively innocent,’ the criminal bogeyman remains alive and well on digital media platforms like YouTube. Punitive frames associated with the ‘worst of the worst,’ in turn, reinforce a punishment paradigm constitutive of contemporary U.S. criminal justice as a whole.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual criminology
• frame analysis
• criminal sentencing
• sentencing clips
• court media
• YouTube

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Olivia Consol and Favian Guertin-Martín for their constant advice and encouragement. I would also like to acknowledge Andrew Pragacz, Toivo Asheeke, and Rae Jereza for their ongoing support, now and throughout my academic journey. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While courts do upload content directly to social media (Moore et al., 2019), the clips retrieved happened to be from news sources and private channels.

2. Notably, some of the clips collected are for cases which received widespread publicity (Larry Nassar, Niko Jenkins, Ariel Castro). For consistency, I decided to omit names and refer to defendants by their race and gender status (excluding the opening vignette which has the defendant’s name in the video title I referenced in-text).

3. While I felt it important to consider approximations of race, gender, and age depicted in videos, demographic information listed here is based on phenotype (with comparison to surname when available in video descriptions). This is an overall poor indicator of socioeconomic status, including race and gender status (see, Chakravartty et al., 2018).

4. I relied on ‘top comments’: those most ‘liked’ by users and featured at the top of the comment section. Comments were collected in an initial browsing on 28 March 2020 and a second browsing on 16 March 2021. As I aimed to capture the most visible and publicly supported comments, I did not consider dialogue in comment threads (although I did see that many reply comments tended to support original commenters’ statements). I also did not re-edit comments for spelling or grammar. Five videos had comment sections turned off.

5. The modern penal system is also formally based on racially ‘colorblind’ jurisprudence (Gotanda, 1991). An appearance of judicial ‘colorblindness’ is shown in a video where a judge condemns a white teenager for stating to his mother on the phone, ‘I am a 16-year-old blonde, probably all I have to do is cry in front of the jury, and they’re going to feel sorry for me’ (YouTube, 2014a).

6. Cesare Beccaria, an early founder of utilitarianism in the 18^th century, generally opposed the death penalty.

7. Indeed, life without parole has been referred to as DBI (Death by Incarceration) by prison organizers serving such sentences (Rosado et al., 2018).

8. In several clips, commenters identify courtroom leniency for women (‘If she was a man, she’d be doing 30 years to life’ (YouTube, 2017g)) and teenagers (‘Stop letting criminals off easy just because they are teenagers. Teenagers know right from wrong!!!’ (YouTube, 2017a)).

9. Defendants are at times viewed as lacking emotion by commenters, judges, and reporters, further adding to a sense of dehumanization. A 23-year old white man, sentenced to life without parole for the murder of a pregnant woman, is described by the judge as ‘morally and emotionally empty inside’ (YouTube, 2017d). Similarly, an online commenter responds to the allocution statement made by a Latinx man sentenced for killing two children in a drunk driving accident: ‘It pisses me off when these people read their apology off of a piece of paper with zero emotion. Dudes not sorry. He deserves to rot in prison’ (YouTube, 2016a). When defendants do show emotion, for example when crying in the courtroom, they are met with skepticism. A commenter asserts of a white woman who killed three people in a drunk driving accident: “She is crying because she got 50 years, not because she killed a child and her parents. I hope she suffers everyday” (YouTube, 2019d).

10. While I cannot make determinations of socioeconomic status based on uploaded profile pictures, this comment appears to be made by a young Black man. To this, it is important to note that, while viewers and commenters certainly make up a broad range of racial identities, viewership is ultimately made within a racially saturated – and oppressive – field of (white) visuality (Butler, 1993).

11. As a criminal offense is deemed to have harmed the public as a whole, the primary role of the victim in a criminal trial is to act as a witness (Simon, 2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Revier

Kevin Revier is an assistant professor at Arcadia University in the Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice department. His interests include cultural criminology, drug war, and social movement.