Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Agential epistemic injustice in criminal prosecution occurs when declarations taken in moments of reduced capacity for self-determination receive excessive credibility. Specifically in the context of recanted out-of-court confessions, the article investigates which legal criteria for the rational evaluation of evidence could prevent agential injustices. The method employed was bibliographical research on epistemic injustice, reliability of confessions as criminal evidence, and the Superior Court of Justice’s case law. Analyzing empiric research on false confessions and forensic practices in Brazil, a significant risk for agential injustices can be detected, mainly because out-of-court confessions are largely used to justify criminal convictions. The article concludes with two propositions: (I) to disregard, during the evaluation of evidence, out-of-court confessions not repeated before a judge; and (II) to consider the level of the defendant’s effective epistemic agency when evaluating their confession, with less credibility given to confessions obtained in situations of reduced agency.

Epistemic injustices concern a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as an epistemic subject; that is, as a subject that participates in the production, maintenance and transmission of epistemic goods. Assuming that one of the goals, but certainly not the only one, of the judicial system is to promote decisions that are reasonably plausible, epistemic injustices interfere with such goal. One aim of this paper is to offer a couple of institutional recommendations that contribute to mitigate the epistemic injustices that judges could commit. These recommendations are based on empirical data from the social sciences. Another aim is to argue, partly on the basis of those interventions, that neither the individualist approach nor the structuralist approach, which locate the problem and the necessary changes to remedy it in the individual’s mind or the structures of our environment (respectively), are adequately understood. In particular, this article answers the question: what kind of interventions, given the empirical data available, is more likely to be efficient?, showing that such interventions are hybrid, combining the individual and the structural, given the interdependence of the individual and the structural, and offering two illustrative examples of diverse strategies of this sort of interventions.

The article looks for reasons that explain the different results of criminal investigations conducted inside and outside prisons. We ask if and how the concept of epistemic injustice, as developed by Miranda Fricker, helps to understand those variations. The underlying hypothesis is that epistemic injustice is a symptom of a wider problem. The authors assume that the treatment of victims of violent crime inside prison has structural rather than interpersonal explanations. In a qualitative approach the study uses data from a series of semi-structured interviews with prisoners and prison officers (40 interviews in total). It explores the dynamics of the decision to report crime committed inside prisons and the role of different institutions involved in the investigation of these crimes from the perspective and experience of prisoners and prison officers. As result it is argued, that Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice is not very helpful when it comes to understand epistemic injustice suffered by victims of violent crime inside prison. It can be better understood in the terms of epistemic oppression used by Dotson. Thus, it is not about assigning blame but how to change the underlying social relations and institutions that subordinate prisoners on epistemic grounds.

This article discusses the application of the concept of hermeneutical injustice (Miranda Fricker, 2007) in judicial contexts. It argues that the application of this concept to capture problems of judicial unintelligibility of marginalized experiences is not so clearly discernible. There is an obstacle for its application in the law when the elements that, according to Fricker, comprise the definition of hermeneutical injustice are analyzed. More specifically, its purely structural character does not fit very well in a realistic picture of the activity of judicial interpretation. From this perspective, judicial interpreters have a decisive role in avoiding or creating hermeneutical gaps. Beyond the agential component of judicial hermeneutic injustice, it is argued that the intentionality of the judicial interpreter is, in a certain sense, peculiar – and this is particularly evident in criminal cases. The conclusion of this article is that judicial hermeneutical injustice blurs the line between the structural and agential dimensions of hermeneutical injustice, so that Fricker's definition is only partially useful for law.

The present work examines the practice of epistemic injustice by attributition of credibility excess to awarded collaborators. The question that is being investigated is: do the collaborators’ narratives receive exaggerated confidence? In order to be characterized as a type of epistemic injustice, such excess of credibility must be due to identity prejudices (against the accused defendants) and in disagreement with the evidences of the process. The attribution of credibility excess to the versions of the collaborators is an implication of the automatic reduction of the weight attributed to the versions of the accused defendants. To address the issue, the probative value of the awarded collaboration in criminal proceedings will be discussed; explained the concept of “epistemic injustice”, identified by Miranda Fricker, and more recent developments by Jennifer Lackey and José Medina; and, finally, in order to assess whether there was epistemic injustice due to credibility excess attributed to awarded collaborators, one sentence handed down by ex-judge Sergio Moro in the scope of the Lava Jato operation.

In the article, the author addresses the issue of the judicial assessment of expert evidence in Polish criminal proceedings. Over the years, the reliance of the criminal justice system on experts increased dramatically. Nowadays, expert evidence plays a pivotal role in court disputes, directly influencing the outcome of judicial proceedings. Experience, however, shows that erroneous expert reports and flawed testimonies may lead to erroneous judicial decisions inflicting irreparable personal and social harm. Unfortunately, the existing model of forensic expert services in Poland is not prone to manipulations and in its current shape cannot guarantee the reliability of expert evidence. Several procedural and structural solutions have been proposed to enhance the credibility of court-appointed experts over recent years. The author examines their advantages and limitations to identify the ones that are realistic and workable.

This article addresses the question of whether the concept of epistemic injustice is useful in the evaluation of the design of criminal procedures. The irruption of this concept makes special sense in a scenario in which jurists show a growing interest in epistemology. The exercise of translation of the latter towards the legal, however, has been incomplete, since its social and ethical dimensions have been neglected. Recent clarifications of the contours of epistemic injustice, lead towards paying attention to issues structural in nature. The concept thus exhibits its potential to rethink criminal procedures, both from its methodological and symbolic dimension, especially if attention is paid to the notion of epistemic agency.

Although testimonial injustice was originally conceived as a prejudiced and unwarranted reduction of credibility, in this text the concept is expanded according to Jennifer Lackey’s proposal to include excess credibility caused by agential epistemic injustice as part of the concept. Agential epistemic injustice occurs when excessive credibility is attributed to a person’s statements precisely when the subject’s epistemic agency (the condition of acting as a subject of knowledge) has been obstructed. From a concern with institutional reform, the article both examines the context of criminal justice systems that facilitate false confessions and proposes reflections on the changes that are necessary for the implementation of more epistemic justice within those systems.

There is a growing awareness that there are many subtle forms of exclusion and partiality that affect the correct workings of a judicial system. The concept of epistemic injustice, introduced by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, is a useful conceptual tool to understand forms of judicial partiality that often go undetected. In this paper, we present Fricker’s original theory and some of the applications of the concept of epistemic injustice in legal processes. In particular, we want to show that the seed planted by Fricker has flourished into a rich field of study in which the concept is used to analyze many different phenomena in law, not always following the original characterization provided by her. This has led to a distinction between what we will call the narrow version of the concept, which is closer to Fricker’s original account, and the wider version of epistemic injustice, which is a more controversial notion because it is always on the verge of morphing into other well-known concepts like sexism, racial discrimination, oppression, silencing, and gaslighting. We will show that the value of the narrow version is mostly theoretical, and that in order to use the concept of epistemic injustice one must adopt a more liberal understanding of it.

Armed conflict can have influence on territories in different aspects. One of them is related with the agricultural use of the land. Particularly about capitalist and peasant uses. This article looks for causes that explain the differences in the change of agricultural land uses in two municipalities of the east of Colombia (Mesetas and Vistahermosa) as an effect of the armed conflict between 1998 and 2014. This work used a focused and structured comparison to reflect, through the behavior of some variables chosen, the differences between capitalist and peasant crops under an armed conflict period. This work found that the central reason for the differences between the crops of the municipalities was the differentiated presence of armed actors. Thus, although the municipalities in principle showed a tendency to adapt the uses to the conflict, after the most intense period, in Mesetas the conflict generated decrease while in Vistahermosa capitalist crops grew.