Review: Ana Lúcia Pastore Schritzmeyer, Jogo, ritual e teatro: um estudo antropológico do Tribunal do Júri. São Paulo: Terceiro Nome, 2012.

Abstract

Over the past year, two decisions made by grand juries again shed a spotlight on the vexed history of race and criminal justice in the United States. In Missouri, a grand jury decided not to indict a policeman in the shooting of an unarmed young black man. In New York, a grand jury declined to indict another policemen who choked to death a vendor in Times Square, Eric Garner, also an unarmed black man. In both cases, the police officers and the majority of the members of the jury were white. Across much of the United States, and during much of its history, criminal grand juries have more than reflected prevailing attitudes about race: the composition of juries was an underlying motive for voter disenfranchisement in the South during segregation. Jury duty has long been connected with voluntary voter registration, so in the U.S. South, denying blacks the right to vote was a guaranteed way to make sure black people never sat in judgment of white people. Despite widespread scrutiny of the grand jury decisions in Missouri and New York, little seems likely to change: it has long been the case that grand juries are very likely to indict murder suspects, but very unlikely to do so when those suspects are police. This is where it is helpful to have a fresh comparative perspective like that provided by Ana Lúcia Schritzmeyer, professor of Sociology at the University of São Paulo, in her book Jogo, ritual e teatro: um estudo antropológico do Tribunal do Júri. A work of legal anthropology, Jogo, ritual e teatro examines the dynamics of juries in Brazil, a country where they are not employed in most trials. In Brazil, juries only decide murder cases. These cases carry as a maximum sentence life imprisonment: Brazil was one of the first nations to abolish the death penalty, doing so in the nineteenth century.Schritzmeyer's study focuses on jury trials of murder cases in São Paulo,