Pragmatic legal argumentation in the jury court: literature as an instrument for humanizing the defendant

Abstract

The Jury Court is a special body of the Judiciary of the first instance, belonging to the ordinary courts, made up of a judge, who is the president, and 25 citizens, seven of whom are drawn by lot at each session, to judge crimes against life. It is provided for in art. 5, XXXVIII, of the Federal Constitution, and in the Code of Criminal Procedure, between arts. 406 and 497. In the Jury Court, it is not enough to have a broad defense, a principle common to all proceedings in the Democratic State of Law, but the principle of full defense is in force, which allows the defenders to use the most diverse means of persuasion to accept the theses presented, and arguments that are not merely legal can be explored, presenting social, philosophical, psychological issues, among others that value the dignity of the human person and place the accused in a position of citizen with rights to be truly preserved. From this perspective, taking into account the fullness of the defense, the possibility of jurors deciding by intimate conviction, the sovereignty of the verdict and the theory of legal argumentation, the aim of this article is to encourage the use of literary texts as a defense tool in the jury chamber.