When Men Kill Women and When Women Kill Men: The Aspects of Gender and Social Class in Legal Discourse at Homicide Trials

This work investigates how aspects of gender relations permeate the system of justice, giving rise to practices that corroborates relations of dominance and of reproduction of inequalities in the trial by Jury. It analyzed the discourses of the prosecutors and public defenders who acted in the trial by Jury in the city of Porto Alegre, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil, from October 2008 until November 2010 only in cased involving men who killed women and women who killed men. A total of 26 sessions where observed and systematically registered in field diaries. The study identified aspects related to gender and social classes being mobilized in the discourse of those agents in the legal field to consubstantiate their thesis for both accusation and defense. It is possible to perceive that these aspects are summoned in representations ellaborated in the discourse as an strategy undertaken by the agents for a differentiation of the cases submitted to the trial as being either “crimes of passion” or “drug trafficking crimes”. According to the findings of this research, the resort to this strategy makes evident a discursive violence in relation to aspects of gender and social class yielding the idea of defendants (female or male), victims (female or male) or crime committed being “more accepted” or “more tolerated” than others.