The Jury Summation as Speech Genre

The American courtroom trial is a speech situation. Everything occurs through the spoken word. The 'summation', as speech event embedded within the trial, which is the chronological and psychological culmination of it, is one of the few opportunities for the lawyer to communicate directly with jurors. But the speech genre summation involves preliminaries as well as the event itself; and it can affect the aftermath of the trial, for the decisions of the jurors may be influenced by this discourse.