In doubt, she was morally condemned instead of legally acquitted: Ethnography of a trial by jury of São Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

This text presents an ethnography carried out during a session of the 1st Jury of the city of São Paulo, on May, 2008. Its analysis aims to contribute to critical reflections on the frightening growth of punitive desires and demands for law and order in the name of the security of “good citizens”, which very often occurs at the expense of the law itself and due to the selective strength of social markers such as gender, race and socioeconomic power. At the trial in question, a young woman, then 26 years old, was sentenced to 26 years and 2 months imprisonment for omission in the torture and murder of her daughter. The girl was killed in July 2004, at the age of 5, by her mother’s companion, a police officer tried months before and sentenced to 40 years in prison for those crimes. Despite legal doubts about the defendant’s complicity in the death of her daughter, she was condemned for her “sexual morality”, considered incompatible with that of a “good mother”.