Reading intent from text: forensic pragmatics, digital messages, and the legal interpretation of mens rea in Indonesia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.67490/ijll.v1i3.1037Keywords:
digital evidence, forensic pragmatics, Indonesia, mens rea, speech actsAbstract
Background: Digital messages have become legally consequential in Indonesian criminal proceedings, yet their use to infer mens rea remains vulnerable to pragmatic ambiguity, evidentiary fragmentation, and doctrinal over-extension. Objective: This study examines how Indonesian legal discourse interprets intent, knowledge, unlawfulness, and distribution from digital-message evidence through forensic-pragmatic, evidentiary, and criminal-law lenses. Method: This study applies qualitative document analysis to 25 verified public legal-linguistic documents, comprising statutes, Constitutional Court decisions, scholarly articles, and contextual legal-policy sources, coded through pragmatic intent-cue analysis, digital evidence reliability assessment, and mens rea threshold mapping. Results: Pragmatic intent-cues are distributed across conceptual-methodological framing, normative offence-language cues, publicness-oriented interpretation, and transmission-sequence evidence. Digital-message evidence becomes legally usable only when textual meaning is stabilized through source authority, authentication, metadata, completeness, and procedural reliability. Mens rea appears as a thresholded inference rather than a direct textual fact, requiring convergence between speech acts, evidentiary integrity, and offence elements. Implication: This study shows that Indonesian courts and legal analysts should distinguish communicative meaning, evidentiary reliability, and doctrinal liability before attributing criminal intent to digital texts. Novelty: This study offers an integrated forensic-pragmatic model for reading mens rea from digital messages in Indonesia's post-2026 criminal-law environment.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Olifa Watugigir (Author)
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