Hypno-questioning technique: A questioning strategy to uncover witness honesty in Indonesian courtroom discourse

This dataset contains analytically reconstructed courtroom interaction excerpts illustrating hypno-questioning techniques employed by attorneys when examining suspect witnesses and fact witnesses in Indonesian criminal trials. The dataset is derived from systematic qualitative analysis grounded in Relevance Theory and hypnotic language patterns, focusing on how questioning strategies guide, constrain, and shape witness responses during courtroom interaction.
The data comprise reconstructed excerpts from criminal cases adjudicated in three Indonesian district courts: Pengadilan Negeri Bantul (PN-BTL), Pengadilan Negeri Yogyakarta (PN-YK), and Pengadilan Negeri Sleman (PN-SLM). To ensure ethical compliance and confidentiality, all excerpts are analytically reconstructed rather than verbatim transcripts, while preserving interactional logic, pragmatic force, and institutional norms characteristic of Indonesian courtroom discourse.
The dataset includes two witness categories: suspect witnesses and fact witnesses. For suspect witnesses, the dataset documents nine types of hypno-questioning techniques, including Presupposition, Embedded Command, Mental Imagery, Soft Suggestion, State Elicitation, Commitment Framing, Temporal Framing, Perspective Shift, and Double Bind. For fact witnesses, the same set of techniques is represented, reflecting differences in distribution and interactional function across witness roles.
Each data entry consists of bilingual representations (Indonesian as the source language and English as the target language), accompanied by metadata specifying court location, case type, time stamp (minutes and seconds), and technique code (HQ1–HQ9). Case types are also presented bilingually to facilitate interpretability for international audiences.
This dataset serves as the empirical foundation for the associated journal article and is intended to support transparency, replicability, and comparative discourse analysis in legal linguistics, forensic pragmatics, and courtroom interaction research.