High-profile trials are often held up as emblematic of social justice causes, but this often obscures rather than clarifies justice issues for the public. Trial outcomes may be seen as proxies of much deeper, structural problems, though media coverage routinely focuses on singular, criminal justice outcomes. This study uses a press analysis of two high-profile cases to investigate how these dynamics restrict our cultural understandings of justice outside the context of formal criminal justice responses. Specifically, we use three forms of media discourse to examine public discussion following the verdicts in the Stanford rape case in 2015 and the killing of Philando Castile by Officer Jeronimo Yanez in Minnesota in 2016. We find that both cases elicited diverse narratives, including those calling for alternative justice processes and penal populist ones. We explore these narratives under the framing of system failure, examining three different articulations. We conclude by theorizing the implications each case raises for how media negotiate ideas about what constitutes justice.

备受瞩目的审判通常被认为是社会正义事业的象征，但这往往掩盖而不是澄清公众的正义问题。审判结果可能被视为更深层次的结构性问题的代表，尽管媒体报道通常侧重于单一的刑事司法结果。本研究对两个备受瞩目的案例进行了新闻分析，以调查这些动态如何在正式刑事司法回应的背景下限制我们对司法的文化理解。具体来说，我们使用三种形式的媒体话语来审视在 2015 年斯坦福强奸案和 2016 年明尼苏达州杰罗尼莫·亚内斯警官杀害 Philando Castile 之后的公众讨论。我们发现这两个案件引发了不同的叙述，包括那些呼吁替代司法程序和刑事民粹主义程序的人。我们在系统故障的框架下探索这些叙述，检查三种不同的表达方式。我们通过理论化每个案例对媒体如何协商关于什么构成正义的想法的影响得出结论。