| There is a growing dissatisfaction amongst the majority of people in Malawi in the manner they look at their legal system as a whole.Different lay commentators of law have argued that legal system is a farce,a cartel,a chain of useless threats that has brought the country to its knees.It is a system which is colonized,fraudulent,biased,and segregative from its medium to practice with players who have not really helped the nation.All these remarks question the sincerity of the justice system in which everybody is vulnerable and susceptible.This study therefore picked up the topic of(in)sincerity to examine what exactly goes in court by investigating how justice is negotiated,pursued,and realized by different players in a trial using data from twenty-two criminal courts obtained from subordinate and High courts in Malawi.Our understanding was that addressing features of insincerity in the manner lawyers ask questions,and how prosecution witnesses respond to such questions can help in addressing people’s dissatisfaction of the justice system at a broader picture.Throughout our study.we have treated insincerity not as a synonym for lyings but rather as a mode of control for lawyers questions,and as a form of non-cooperation(intentional insincerity),and as a social construct(unintentional insincerity)for witnesses responses.But first,we have reviewed three theoretical models such as Grice’s(1975)Cooperative Principle,Heffer’s(2019)Discursive Untruthfulness Model,and Liao’s(2005/2009)Goal-driven Principle,and used them in our analysis supplemented by NVivo 11pro,one of the leading software in qualitative research.However,these models fall short in some aspects.This has prompted us to develop a new model called the Principle of Believability which has been used in addressing the impact of insincerity in the overall realization of justice in a trial.Second,we have examined insincerity in prosecution and defense lawyers’ questioning strategies by looking at the prescribed degrees of control questions exert on the witnesses in relation to their productiveness.We have discovered that prosecution asks questions that are less insincere which sharply contrasts with those produced by defense lawyers which are highly insincere.Prosecution lawyers ask questions for information seeking as a proxy for providing supportive role to their witnesses.Questions by defense lawyers are tools for controlling and intimidating witnesses in order to thwart and discredit their testimony,trap and injure witnesses’character.These differences are a result of 1)their goals and goal relationship with the witnesses,2)the provisions in legal statutes that exhibit biases towards defense counsels which reveal grave discrepancies between insights that are legally binding and those that are linguistically grounded.Third,we have investigated how prosecution witnesses(whether professional or lay)respond to such mode of questions by tracing instances of intentional and unintentional insincerity.Intentional insincerity has been introduced to refer to deliberate means of showing non-cooperation.In Malawi,professional witnesses blatantly fail to uphold the conversation by suspending,opting out,withholding and misleading;strategies that fall into the negative pole of intentional insincerity continuum.However,lay witnesses prefer to flout maxims of manner,quantity and relevance;strategies which falls towards the positive pole of the continuum.These strategies negatively affect believability levels of one’s narration especially in goal-oriented talk.The study argues that prosecution witnesses must be very much concerned with how much they make themselves believed;their ability to move the court by pushing their testimony towards higher levels of believability.Unintentional insincerity,though done consciously,results from listeners subjective judgments(socially constructed)which are factors beyond speaker’s control.From the side of professional witnesses,their failure to respond to questions that calls for their professionalism,and also their failure to narrow down the evidence to the accused breed unintentional insincerity which has a huge negative bearing on the strength of their testimony.Similarly,lay and vulnerable witnesses oftentimes fail to provide crucial details in relation to time and dates,and fail to provide direct responses to some questions;these are markers of unintentional insincerity which can eventually weaken believability levels of their testimony.So,although causes of perceived insincerity are done consciously,but they are not intended.These are as a result of system failure which drags the testimony towards negative pole and becomes hard to move the court.The study recommends that government needs to take deliberate steps and address problems regarding access to law by including it in education curriculum and by civic educating the local masses.Court interpreters need formal training.Police and medical institutions need to be provided with enough forensic toolkits.If these challenges are not addressed justice in least developed countries like Malawi will be a myth which fuels people’s distrust and dissatisfaction. |
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