Professor Kerstin Carlson, who teaches jointly in History, Law and Society and International Comparative Politics, will give a talk entitled "Constructing Remorse as a Legal Category: Plea Bargains Before the ICTY."
Nineteen defendants have pled guilty before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and received sentencing credit from the court for their demonstration of “remorse”. The paper reviews the 19 articulated allocutions of remorse and locates them within one of three categories: 1. “genuine/sincere” (four defendants); 2. “justification/passivity narratives” (ten defendants); and 3. “words don’t match deeds” (five defendants). The paper argues that the ICTY’s practice of declining to import legal significance to what defendants appear to mean when they say they are sorry, when considered in conjunction with the ICTY’s capacity to consider the credibility of the content of defendants’ utterances in other contexts, demonstrates that the central socially constitutive role that such statements are imagined to play for the peoples of the ex-Yugoslavia lies in their structural signification of defendant cooperation, and not as regards the individual’s relationship to the crimes that she admits to having committed.