The Crimes of the corner of sin

an essay on truth in criminal proceedings

Abstract

This essay addresses the fluidity of the categories of truth and falsehood, seeking to highlight their extreme dependence on the contexts in which facts are reproduced, already in a time when they no longer exist, being merely the subject of narratives that compete with each other for the quality of being true. The idea of truth and falsehood in the context of criminal proceedings, which is the horizon of the jurist, is of interest. It happens that the process consists of standardized acts, whose area of interest is limited to what is obtained according to its own rules, from which the establishment of a certain truth necessarily results, since the problem of the process is to resolve conflicts. It is, therefore, a procedural truth. But, in a way, the only possible one and, moreover, the only objectively useful one, as this truth will determine the outcome of the case being judged. The text is, almost entirely, the account of crimes that occurred in the past, in a small town in the interior of São Paulo, with the intention of capturing, here and there, the persistent duality between truth and lies in the narrative. And, above all, the persistent subordination of these categories to the circumstances imposed by the social and symbolic context of the reproduction of the facts and the interpretation given to them by the judges who, in various judicial instances, had the task of judging the defendant and establishing the truth about the events.