“In dubio pro Estado”: sujeitos matáveis nos discursos e práticas dos Tribunais do Júri da cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The present research aimed to explore the practices and discourses from criminal procedures concerning the police conduct submitted to Rio de Janeiro Jury Courts. In order to do so, an inductive, empirical and descriptive approach was enforced, based on critical criminology and critical discourse analysis, alongside transdisciplinary contributions from philosophy, history, sociology, law theory, criminal law and criminal procedural law. The study’s corpus was composed by 67 procedures, selected from hearing schedules of three of the four functioning juries in Rio de Janeiro city, and divided into three categories: policemen as defendants, policemen as victims and conflicts with no police involved. A documental analysis was made on the written court records and, in parallel, some jury sessions were observed, taken as a case(s) study. From the obtained results, at first the jury institution is presented, with its normative and empirical aspects. Subsequently, the discourses from the studied cases are analyzed. At last, some aspects of the practical law in force within the judiciary agencies are described. The conclusion is that the State defense against its political and racial enemies is the forming principle of the juridical practices and it is dissimulated in the discursive sphere as a social defense against ontic enemies, producing detainable, woundable and killable subjects, who retain their condition regardless of the procedural position they occupy (either defendants or victims).