This project investigates contemporary U.S. sexual assault trials, focusing on how legal norms for trying sexual assault and interpreting consent have been shaped by medico-legal evidence and expertise. In a post-forensic age, medico-legal evidence has captured the civil and scholarly imagination, drawing on public resources while shifting practices within the sexual assault trial. Ethnographic study at the site of the trial focuses on the process of sexual assault adjudication in order to identify how various actors assemble, represent and use evidence and expertise in the legal forum. Combining anthropological and criminological backgrounds, investigators use court observations, interviews, and trial transcripts to analyze the ways in which evidence produces cultural narratives of sexual assault within the trial setting. This study identifies where institutional practices introduce jurisdictional variation. Investigators will observe sexual assault adjudication in three branches of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, and interview forensic nurse examiners, victim-witness advocates, attorneys, expert witnesses, and judges.
Incorporating grounded theory and feminist perspectives, this study explores the cultural value of forensic evidence. It engages researchers across a range of disciplines, including legal anthropology and sociology, gender, and social studies of science and medicine. Despite public cries for accountability and legislative efforts to insure rape kit processing, researchers know very little about what types of evidence are most compelling, how evidence is made compelling, and how it impacts decision-makers in sexual assault trials. This project fills gaps in research on sexual assault adjudication by examining the inclusion and presentation of medico-legal and forensic evidence in the courtroom, particularly as evidence is used to make claims about consent and credibility.
