Seeing the Case Clearly: File‐Work, Material Mediation, and Visualizing Practices in a Dutch Criminal Court

Dead Reckoning: Unraveling How “Homicide” Cases Travel From Crime Scene to Court Using Qualitative Research Methods

“…An agile and pragmatic approach to sensemaking is commended by investigators and adherence to formal models of deductive or inductive reasoning are seen as inaccurate depictions of the ways that the repertoire of shifting, contested, and amended, accounts emerge in the course of such investigations. As an example, our data illustrate the limitations of determining the mode of death through the technical routines of a medicolegal autopsy and how some deaths (forever) remain equivocal despite sustained investigative efforts (see also Simon, 2018;Timmermans, 2005). In other homicide investigations that we studied, unexpected findings from investigative inquiries or forensic examinations changed the course of investigations or led to a reframing of the dominant narrative (to which we return shortly).…”

“…From the earliest moments of an investigation, police and medical professionals begin to construct the death as a (potential) homicide or suspicious death. These constructions are subsequently confirmed (refuted, remain ambiguous, or undetermined) through further complex medicolegal processes (see Timmermans, 2005). Research has shown that these earliest interpretations are crucial in informing whether actors interpret the circumstances as suspicious, what experts they call upon, and whether and how the body of the victim is recovered for forensic examination (Jones, 2016).…”

“…To illustrate, Atkinson (1979) argues that suicide is a socially (rather than naturally) constructed phenomenon, that is, certain social contexts (particular causes of death, locations, and circumstances) are interpreted as indicators of suicide. Timmermans (2005) similarly suggests that medical professionals in Western societies classify and align equivocal deaths into culturally appropriate categories; for example, the classification of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (rather than homicide) depends on the consensus in medical circles around the possibilities of multiple child deaths in the same family.…”

Culture, Milieu, Phenotype: Articulating Race in Judicial Sense-making Practices

“…Dupret, et al, 2015;Garfinkel, 1967;Tata, 2020). It sought to carefully trace the ways judges make sense of cases and defendants not by assuming a central axis of difference -for example, by comparing and contrasting cases involving White versus non-White defendants, or defendants 'from different cultures' -but rather sought to stay with the ways judges perceived and constructed cases (van Oorschot 2014(van Oorschot , 2018van Oorschot and Mascini 2018) as well as ordered cases and individuals as similar or different (see also Mascini et al, 2016;van Oorschot et al, 2017). As such it was concerned with judges' 'lay ontologies' (Durrheim and Dixon, 2000), that is, vernacular understandings of the way things are and have to be for them to get their job done.…”

Visible and Invisible Sentencing

“…All they have is the information which has been presented to them in the documentation ( and to what was said in court 6 ). An offender will usually appear in court and may in some circumstances give evidence or make a personal statement but more commonly most of the information about the offender will come from reports contained in the case file (van Oorschot, 2014). These professional practices generate an element of consistency in sentencing.…”