“In the cloudy waters of the criminal law”: the facts and the evidence in the prosecution in cases of police lethality

Abstract

This article aims to complex the reading about the evidence in the processes of legal accountability arising from police approaches resulting in death. Essentially, we seek to organize the literature on the subject and reread the data produced in case studies, previously developed by the author. The analysis of recent research on police lethality, the systematic reading of public documents and other insums of case studies allow shedding light on three dimensions of evidence in the accountability of public security agents involved in the death of civilians: uncertainty, recursion and dialecticity, categories constructed from the works of Françoise Tulkens and Michel Van De Kerchove (1998), regarding the opacity of criminal law and that, in this article, enable an understanding of the nodes that has made it impossible to hold the police that kill.

Keywords

• letalidade policial
• processo penal
• prova
• “autos de resistência”
• impunidade.