Study On Strategies Of Pleadings In Criminal Defense Based On Goal-directed Principle

Pleadings involving homicide are strongly purpose-driven for being involved with life or death, freedom or captivity. Moreover, these pleadings are all from the U.S. well-renowned defense attorneys whose language abilities are hard to hold a candle for a lot of people. However, few scholars have made specialized researches in this field.Therefore, this paper takes the pleadings involving homicide cases as its corpus source and the Goal-directed Principle as its theoretical framework. It is an analytic research on six typical cases in terms of goal and power, goal hierarchy, and goal relations. The paper suggests some discourse strategies, such as using special terms, conducting logical reasoning, employing presupposition, and adopting various types of figures of speech. The analysis shows that such discourse strategies play a vital role in striking a sympathetic chord among the jury and the judge, thereby attaining the goal of convincing the jury and the judge, thus proving innocence or pleading for mitigation of penalty for the defendants.Through the research on discourse strategies employed in pleadings involving homicide cases, this thesis is aimed to help develop a better understanding of the discourse strategies in such pleadings; enrich the study on criminal pleadings; conduce to the theoretical development of Goal-directed Principle; and shed light onto the research in the field of legal practice.