‘Dr Shipman told you that…’ The organising and synthesising power of quotation in judicial summing-up

•A corpus of 294,000 words of summing-up discourse in the Harold Shipman murder trial is examined.•Patterns of referring and quotation are examined, focusing chiefly on ‘said’ and ‘told’.•Quotation is selective and organisational.•It puts together speech uttered at different times creating contrast and highlighting inconsistency.•The judge (re)organises and synthesises quoted speech, making the jury question the evidence and stimulate decision-making.

Judicial summing-up discourse is explored using a computer-assisted discourse studies approach (CADS) to investigate meaning in patterns of referring to and quoting the defendant. A small specialised corpus of 294,000 words, which forms the eleven days of summing-up in the Dr Harold Shipman murder trial, is created and used. Analysis focuses on the pragmatic effects of the metadiscursive and sensory verbs, refer, remind, summarise, look, read, and the most frequent and ‘key’ reporting verbs told and said. Results show how the judge’s recapitulation of the defendant’s words organises and synthesises the evidence for the jury, using the authority of quotation and judicial (re)organisation to make the jury question the contrasted material and to stimulate meaning-making and decision-making.