Mental illness, partial responsibility and evidential stance in Saudi homicide judgements: a forensic-pragmatic and cognitive analysis

Abstract

This article examines how mental illness, criminal responsibility and evidential stance are linguistically constructed in Saudi homicide judgements. Using a corpus-assisted qualitative design, it screens the 15 homicide judgements listed in Majmuʿat al-Ahkam al-Qadaʾiyya (Vol. 13) and then develops an extended case study of the schizophrenia ruling that contains the richest psychiatric reasoning. The study integrates forensic pragmatics, stance/evidentiality research and cognitive linguistics and is informed by Islamic jurisprudential notions of ʿaql (reason), ahliyya (legal capacity) and taklif (moral accountability). Judicial reasoning is treated as a sequence of institutional utterances that not only report facts but re-rank competing voices and propositions. The analysis shows how the court hierarchises an early detailed confession, later claims of insanity/amnesia and psychiatric committee reports into a coherent construction of partial responsibility and deficient capacity, enabling doctrinal mitigation without full exculpation. Arabic stance verbs and evidential frames grade epistemic commitment towards medical and factual propositions, while recurrent lexical choices stabilise an intermediate prototype of the mentally ill yet punishable offender. The findings extend stance and cognitive-framing accounts of judicial discourse to a sharia-based criminal system and foreground the discursive foundations of responsibility determinations. A glossary of key Islamic legal terms used in this article is provided in Supplementary Appendix B.