Credibility in the record: reported speech, narrative consistency, and judicial evaluation in Indonesian criminal proceedings

Abstract

Background: Credibility in Indonesian criminal proceedings is not simply heard; it is recorded, reformulated, compared, and finally converted into legal reasoning through layered institutional documentation. Objective: This study examines how reported speech forms, narrative consistency, and judicial credibility evaluation are textually organized within Indonesian criminal proceeding records. Method: This study applies qualitative forensic-linguistic analysis to a corpus of 23 verified public items, comprising 12 primary criminal judgment records, 8 secondary scholarly sources, and 3 legal-context documents, using speech attribution analysis, narrative alignment analysis, and judicial credibility analysis. Results: The analysis shows that credibility is most often produced through judicially summarized testimony, corroborative alignment across witnesses and records, and graded evidentiary uptake rather than simple acceptance or rejection. Reported speech is dominated by summary and indirect reporting rather than verbatim quotation, narrative consistency is constructed through comparison across procedural materials, and judicial evaluation privileges corroborated, chronologically stabilized testimony. Implication: This study demonstrates that criminal credibility should be understood as a record-based, institutionally mediated achievement rather than an intrinsic property of a speaker. Novelty: This study offers an integrated framework linking reported speech analysis, narrative consistency, and judicial credibility evaluation within Indonesian criminal proceedings.