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."听
Nineteen defendants have pled听guilty听before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and received sentencing credit from the court for their demonstration of 鈥渞emorse鈥�. The paper reviews the 19 articulated allocutions of remorse and locates them within one of three categories: 1. 鈥済enuine/sincere鈥� (four defendants); 2. 鈥渏ustification/passivity narratives鈥� (ten defendants); and 3. 鈥渨ords don鈥檛 match deeds鈥� (five defendants). The paper argues that the ICTY鈥檚 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鈥檚 capacity to consider the credibility of the content of defendants鈥� 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鈥檚 relationship to the crimes that she admits to having committed.
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