This study draws on publicly available video recordings from the 2014 criminal trial State v. Amanda Hayes in the Superior Court of Wake County, North Carolina, where Hayes was charged with the second-degree murder of Laura Ackerson. The footage, archived by WRAL News, provides a complete audiovisual record of the trial. The broader dataset comprises approximately 6 h of questioning over two consecutive days.¹

The analysis focuses on the final 2.5 min of re-cross-examination, during which the prosecutor questions Hayes about the disposal of Laura Ackerson’s remains in Oyster Creek, Texas. Although re-cross is procedurally limited to issues raised on re-direct, it often resurfaces points from earlier testimony, not by reopening them explicitly but by reformulating prior answers in ways that remain procedurally admissible, enabling subtle reassertion of prosecutorial authority. Here, reformulation makes procedural constraint interactionally visible. Examining this brief but densely layered extract therefore demonstrates how interactional asymmetry is enacted precisely at the juncture where the defendant’s narrative concludes and the state’s authority is reinforced (Cotterill, 2003; Matoesian, 2001).

Focusing on such a concise segment aligns with conversation-analytic tradition, which privileges sequential depth over temporal scope (Chatwin, 2014; Heinrichsmeier, 2019; see also Sacks, 1992). CA aims to uncover the organisation of interaction rather than to generalise statistically, showing how institutional authority is produced turn by turn (Heritage and Clayman, 2010; Silverman, 2015). Analytic attention is therefore directed to how actions are recognisably produced and responded to within the sequence, rather than to the representativeness of the dataset.

Transcription was produced by the first author using Transana Standard (v6.21b) and adapted Jeffersonian notation (Jenks, 2011), and was cross-checked against the recordings for accuracy. Pauses, overlaps, and prosodic cues were retained to capture interactional timing. Analysis followed CA principles of sequential grounding, examining turn-taking, question design, repair, and lexical repetition. Analytic claims are supported through participants’ next turns, which display how prior talk is understood, resisted, or reformulated in real time. Reliability was ensured through iterative comparison, analytic discussion in data sessions, and adherence to the next-turn-proof procedure (Schegloff, 1993). From this analysis, three recurrent conversational practices were identified:

Temporal management—strategic use of pause and timing to manage turn closure;

Accordingly, these features provide analytic sufficiency within a single case (Silverman, 2015) and support analytic rather than statistical generalisation (Heritage and Clayman, 2010). While based on a single case, the analysis provides a close, empirically grounded view of how participants manage the closure of testimony in adversarial proceedings, highlighting sequential precision and revealing how institutional authority is both enacted and contested in real time.

Courtroom interaction constitutes an archetypal institutional speech event, governed by pre-allocated roles and unequal participation rights (Atkinson and Drew, 1979). Attorneys manage topic, sequence, and timing, while witnesses are expected to produce brief, compliant responses. Moments that depart from this institutional script—hesitations, overlaps, repairs, or unsolicited elaborations—become sites where witnesses renegotiate agency and display subtle resistance from within the institutional frame (Thornborrow, 2002). These departures illustrate that power is relational, contingent, and continually produced through interaction.

The analysis integrates CA with interpretive Foucauldian-informed and critical-discursive conceptions of power as relational, productive, and co-constituted through discourse (Fairclough, 2015; Foucault, 1982). Within this framework, authority is not a fixed property of institutional actors, but an interactional accomplishment sustained through turn design, sequence organisation, and epistemic positioning.

CA provides the analytic apparatus for identifying how such micro-level practices—question type, timing, overlap, and self-selection—create and contest asymmetry (Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Heritage and Clayman, 2010). The critical-discursive dimension extends this analysis to the ideological level, tracing how these local practices reproduce, challenge, or destabilise institutional legitimacy and moral order (Fairclough, 2015; Wodak and Meyer, 2015). Legitimacy is therefore not imposed but interactionally accomplished (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012); the authority of the courtroom depends on participants’ local orientations to procedural norms.

While the sequential analysis remains grounded in observable interactional detail, interpretive links to Foucauldian conceptions of power are treated as theoretically inferential rather than empirically claimed. CA’s commitment to next-turn evidence constrains interpretation, while the critical-discursive perspective foregrounds reflexive awareness of how analytic interpretation contributes to accounts of institutional meaning (Fairclough, 2015; Schegloff, 1997).

This article builds on prior research (Blewitt, 2018), which examined the full sequence of Amanda Hayes’ cross-examination and identified three key strategies through which she negotiated power:

Self-selection and turn management: Hayes frequently initiated additional turns or expanded minimal responses, resisting the restrictive design of prosecutorial questioning—often continuing past initial answers to reframe the interaction. Such expansions temporarily disrupted the expected question-answer rhythm, allowing her to assert agency and shape the narrative.

Building on these findings, the present study focuses on the final 2.5 min of re-cross-examination, where these strategies are most concentrated. Under the strict constraints of re-cross, these practices appear condensed, emerging through minimal lexical choices, timing, and repair. Analysing this terminal exchange provides a close, empirically grounded view of how authority, agency, and affective stance are negotiated under heightened procedural constraint. This focused lens extends Blewitt’s (2018) earlier work by tracing the intensification and condensation of resistance strategies at the close of testimony, thereby demonstrating how courtroom authority is both performed and destabilised in real time.

Disputes over what Hayes knew become a central site for negotiating epistemic authority through turn design and response timing. Across these turns, the interplay of question design, timing, and lexical choice shapes a constrained but meaningful space in which Hayes can resist, reinterpret, or partially align with the prosecutor’s framing. The analysis below traces how this dynamic unfolds turn by turn, highlighting the shifting distribution of epistemic control (Appendix A, lines 1–35).

This segment foregrounds the moment-by-moment distribution of epistemic control between prosecutor and witness. The prosecutor’s initial turns (lines 1–10) juxtapose two versions of Hayes’ earlier testimony—one claiming knowledge, the other ignorance—thus constructing an apparent inconsistency that Hayes must address. Her minimal “no ma’am” (line 9) invites reinterpretation, prompting the prosecutor to restate her own version of events. Only at line 16 does Hayes explicitly reject that account as “incorrect,” using a standalone evaluative term to momentarily reclaim interactional authority over the framing of her prior words.

Question design here governs the scope of stance. For the first ten lines, the prosecutor’s turns function as declarative formulations rather than interrogatives, treating the narrative as given information that the witness must confirm or deny. The first genuine wh-question (“what did you tell …”, line 18) creates a brief opening for elaboration. Hayes exploits that space to redefine her knowledge through sensory distance, emphasising what she did not see or touch before reaffirming her awareness (“I absolutely knew what he was doing”, line 26). By grounding knowledge in perception and distance, she aligns with the prosecution’s factual frame while preserving moral separation from the act (cf. Heritage and Raymond, 2012; Hutchby, 2001).

This positioning creates a tension between compliance and resistance. Hayes accepts factual framing but contests the moral implication of complicity. Her closing “that is correct” both confirms and delimits the exchange. Through overlap and renewed demand (“what was he doing”, line 28), the prosecutor reasserts prosecutorial control, forcing Hayes to articulate the victim’s body at line 34—a moment where linguistic precision enforces moral acknowledgment. This episode sets the stage for a shift from questions of knowledge to questions of perception, showing how Hayes’ sensory account is both managed by the prosecutor and morally evaluated in the interaction.

In Appendix A, lines 35–36, the prosecutor intensifies pressure by moving from factual to sensory and affective inquiry. The 1.6-s pause after the graphic question (lines 38–39) constitutes a dispreferred-response slot (Raymond, 2003). Hayes’ reply (“I heard lots of things … lots of animals”) uses hedging and repetition to sustain strategic vagueness, indexing both emotional strain and interactional caution.

The prosecutor’s formulation exemplifies narrative coercion (Matoesian, 2001, 2005): questions embedding evaluative presuppositions that compel witnesses to inhabit the examiner’s moral frame. The explicit reference to “her head” functions less as a request for information than as a performative act for the jury, reanimating the crime scene and casting Hayes’ evasiveness as morally problematic.

Hayes’ aborted clauses (“I was …”) at lines 43 and 47 constitute interactionally displayed attempts to project agency, truncated by overlap or self-interruption. The prosecutor’s reformulative summary (lines 48–51) condenses these fragments into a triadic list—“splashing noises, animals, bailing the boat”—simplifying complex experience into a rhetorically manageable frame. This compression contrasts Hayes’ fragmented perceptual account with the gravity of the act, positioning her as emotionally and morally detached. The contrast between Hayes’ account and the prosecutor’s moral framing sets the stage for the final exchange, where fear becomes the key affective resource through which she negotiates both credibility and resistance.

Hayes’ expressions of fear in Appendix A, lines 57–88 become the pivot for negotiating legitimacy. The prosecutor reframes her practical “concern” (line 61) as self-centred fear, contrasting it with the horror of the acts described. Hayes’ extended reply (“I had lots and lots of fear”) simultaneously performs affect and resistance, presenting an appeal to emotional authenticity as a form of moral defence.

The recycling of fear and concern across turns shows how institutional power and personal stance intertwine. Each reuse shifts moral valence: the prosecutor’s use implies self-absorption, while Hayes’ re-use asserts vulnerability. Authority thus operates dialogically; institutional control depends on eliciting and redefining the defendant’s own words.

The closing adjacency pair (lines 81–82) finalises testimony with an asymmetrical exchange of gratitude. Hayes’ subdued “thank you,” following the prosecutor’s disengagement and the judge’s formal closure, re-establishes institutional order, signalling the withdrawal of her voice once its evidentiary function is complete.

Building on the preceding analysis, the final moments of re-cross-examination highlight the interactionally sustained and contingent nature of power negotiation in the courtroom. Interactional asymmetry is not a static hierarchy but a dynamic, moment-by-moment process. Hayes displays agency through self-correction, elaboration, and affective stance, yet each move is reabsorbed and reframed within the prosecutor’s discursive frame. Re-cross-examination thus exposes the recursive nature of institutional power: every act of resistance becomes the material through which authority is renewed and rendered accountable within procedural limits.

Courtroom control here operates through both linguistic precision and moral framing. By compelling articulation (“what was he doing?”) and reshaping affect (“the fear that you were under was that…”), the prosecutor converts epistemic and emotional ambiguity into instruments of control. Yet the persistence of hesitation, overlap, and repetition highlights the precarious nature of that dominance—authority is repeatedly negotiated and sustained in interaction.

This study examines how institutional authority is constructed and negotiated in courtroom discourse, highlighting the interactional mechanisms through which power is exercised and contested. The analysis of the final 2.5 min of Amanda Hayes’ re-cross-examination reveals how adversarial questioning operates under maximal procedural constraint, and how agency and resistance are expressed within the narrow space of re-cross. By focusing on this highly constrained phase of testimony, the study sheds new light on how courtroom authority is both enacted and challenged in real time, particularly in moments when control is at its most explicit.

The sequential patterns identified illustrate that courtroom asymmetry, though procedurally mandated, is achieved locally through the timing and design of turns. This process unfolds not only between prosecutor and defendant but also with the jury as an overhearing audience, whose presence shapes the design, timing, and moral framing of each turn. Legitimacy emerges as a relational process: institutional authority endures interactionally only as participants orient to its procedural and moral order, even while testing its limits. As such, institutional authority is neither absolute nor static but sustained through sequential organisation; even minimal pauses, repairs, or repetitions carry disproportionate significance for negotiating authority within this closing environment.

In these final exchanges, prosecutorial control is maintained through lexical recycling and reformulation of key narrative terms, while the defendant’s delayed and hedged responses enact micro-resistance that momentarily reclaims epistemic footing within the sequence. Similar findings across judicial settings suggest that defendants do not merely submit to institutional constraint but negotiate it through the interactional resources available to them (Atkinson and Drew, 1979; Carter, 2019; Chen et al., 2025; Komter, 2013).

Taken together, these observations recast adversarial questioning as a dialogic process through which institutional control and individual agency are continually recalibrated. The final sequence crystallises this reciprocity: the state’s authority is asserted through question design, while the defendant’s resistance sustains intelligibility both through and within the very norms that constrain her.

The study contributes to research on how linguistic form mediates institutional power (Cotterill, 2003; Matoesian, 2001; Thornborrow, 2002). By focusing on a defendant’s final moments of speech, it foregrounds two interrelated dimensions of power negotiation.

First, epistemic control—the struggle over what can legitimately be known or said—is managed through reformulation and strategic vagueness. Second, moral positioning—the interplay of fear, guilt, and innocence—is accomplished through lexical and prosodic framing. The prosecution’s reformulation of fear and concern transforms affect into evidence, illustrating how emotion is discursively manipulated to craft credibility.

These findings reinforce Bottoms and Tankebe’s (2012) model of legitimacy as dialogic reciprocity: each corrective question or partial admission simultaneously contests and reaffirms procedural authority. The courtroom thus can be understood as a Foucauldian site of productive power (Foucault, 1982; cf. Fairclough, 2015), where resistance is integral to the ongoing reproduction of institutional order. Every hesitation, overlap, or aborted response render authority observable, exposing the interactional labour required to maintain it.

At the discursive level, the defendant’s identity is continuously re-constructed through these exchanges. Hayes’ strategies produce a self that is both compliant and resistant—knowledgeable yet morally distanced. This dual positioning encapsulates the tension between procedural expectations of deference and the impulse for personal self-representation (Komter, 2013; Thornborrow, 2002). The present analysis therefore brings into dialogue micro-sequential and critical-discursive theory, showing how interactional practices both sustain and interrogate institutional legitimacy.

Understanding how asymmetry is negotiated at the micro level has implications for both legal and linguistic practice. For legal professionals, recognising how question design and lexical recycling shape a witness’s narrative may help ensure that procedural control enhances rather than obscures evidential clarity (Cotterill, 2003; Thornborrow, 2002). By acknowledging the nuances of interactional resistance, legal teams can better anticipate how witnesses may assert agency and respond to prosecutorial tactics.

For discourse analysts, the findings underscore the need for multimodal and cross-jurisdictional research on resistance, emotion, and epistemic stance. Attention to gesture, gaze, and prosody could illuminate how embodied conduct sustains or challenges authority (Holmes and Stubbe, 2015). Expanding CA methods to include such non-verbal cues would offer a more holistic understanding of how power is negotiated in courtroom settings. These insights may also inform the study of interactional authority in other institutional contexts, such as police interviews, parliamentary hearings, or regulatory proceedings, where participants navigate procedural asymmetries and exert micro-level agency.

More broadly, situating micro-interactional findings within dialogic theories of legitimacy reveals that institutions depend on the very agency they regulate. The courtroom, as both procedural and moral enterprise, continually re-enacts and sustains its authority through co-operation, correction, and contestation (Bottoms and Tankebe, 2012; Foucault, 1982). The final minutes of Hayes’ testimony thus provide a concentrated instance of how legitimacy is sustained through the visible interplay of control and resistance.