A Forum member who requested not to be identified asked recently what he described as four “just random questions” that, as it turns out, needed a lot of explaining to answer.
Here are the questions he posted on my Facebook Messenger:
1. “How does ‘judgment’ differ with ‘decision’ as applied in legal documentation?
2. “Should the word ‘your’ in ‘your Honor’ be capitalized as a way of addressing the court’s Presiding Judge?”
3. “What is the difference of ‘awhile ago’ and ‘a while ago’?”
4. “Why is the letter ‘t’ enclosed by parenthesis in this quoted jurisprudence used in a court decision: “(t)he Constitution mandates that the accused shall be presumed innocent until the contrary is proven beyond reasonable doubt—the burden lies on the prosecution to overcome such presumption of innocence by presenting the quantum of evidence required. (People v. Cantalejo, 586 SCRA 777)?”
I think these questions and my answers are worth sharing, particularly with those who at one time or another might have been confounded by them.
My answers:1. A “judgment” is usually just anyone’s formal expression of an opinion that may or may not carry the weight of authority, but a “decision” is a final conclusion arrived at usually by an individual who has power or authority, say a court judge or contest juror, to decide or render judgment based on the merits of facts or declarations formally presented by contending parties or participants.
IMAGE CREDIT: ADAPTED FROM DECISION-MAKING-SOLUTIONS.COM2. Yes, the possessive adjective “your” in “your Honor” needs to be capitalized when formally addressing the court’s presiding judge in writing. It’s an intrinsic part of the formal appellation or manner of address, so its first letter should always be capitalized in the same way as that of the first letter of the formal appellation itself: “Your Honor.”
3. The phrase “awhile ago” is considered a solecism, which means an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence. I suggest avoiding its usage altogether and sticking to the grammatically correct three-word “a while ago,” which of course means a few moments or a very short time before the present or the here and now. (By the way, the word “awhile” by its lonesome (without “ago”) means “for a while,” which is perfectly acceptable usage, as in “She stayed awhile this morning.”
4. Why is the lower-case letter “t” enclosed by parenthesis in the quoted jurisprudence you presented? It’s a formal stylistic convention used in English when quoting written statements, not only in legal documents but in all kinds of formal writing such as academic dissertations and research studies. That convention signifies that the very first letter of the first word of the statement being quoted is actually capitalized in the source document, which, in the particular case cited here, will be “The Constitution mandates that the accused shall be presumed innocent until the contrary is proven beyond reasonable doubt-the burden lies...”
Using the lower-case letter “t” enclosed by parenthesis is to denote seamless structural continuity with the exposition used to introduce the quoted material, while at the same time gently alerting the reader that the “t” was actually the capital “T” in the source of the statement quoted.
Right after I posted these answers to his questions, the Forum member asked this intriguing follow-up question to the first: “If the accused, for example, intimated to the court that he is guilty of committing a certain offense in the course of trial, and the court imposes imprisonment for the offense committed by the accused, should the document be called ‘decision’ or ‘judgment’?”
A lawyer I am not, but I felt confident replying as follows: “The imposition of imprisonment will be the ‘sentence’ meted the guilty party, of course, and that sentence will be both the court’s ‘decision’ and ‘judgment.’”
(Next:
Using discourse markers for contextualizing ideas) May 16, 2019
This essay, 1,143rd of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the May 9, 2019 print edition of The Manila Times
, © 2019 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.It originally appeared in a slightly different form in the Forum’s You Asked Me This Question section on March 22, 2019.
