The current article studies judicial discourse, specifically lawyers’ closing arguments regarding “Black Swan” (2024) murder trial which concerns a woman, Ashley Benefield, an ex-ballerina, who killed her husband, Douglas Benefield claiming the action to be self-defense. The discourse study at hand includes the prosecutor’s closing argument of Suzanne O’Donnell who represents the State and condemns the action of killing as murder which must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense is represented by defense lawyer Neil Taylor, who tries to defend his client’s action as self-defense. This legal discourse is studied through qualitative analysis, implemented using the method of rhetorical-stylistic discourse analysis, and supplemented with the author’s quantitative observations of repetitions, direct speech, and rhetorical questions, which are manually counted and compared across each speech under study.
