David Bertet, president of EN VERO, and philosophy PhD student at the University of Montreal, is the author of a brief communication on institutional practices of wrongful convictions, as part of the 88th congress of the French Canadian Association for the Advancement of Science (ACFAS), in the following category: “Cross-over between Reflections on Legality.”
To access David Bertet’s communication (in French), visit the website of the ACFAS.
Communication Summary:
We will propose a conceptual framework that will allow human rights defenders and political theorists to analyze the shortcomings of a variety of judicial systems in countries with a democratic tradition. Based on the case study of Florence Cassez, a French citizen who spent eight years in a Mexican prison, wrongfully convicted of kidnappings by the Mexican courts (2008) despite strong evidence of her innocence, we willshow the existence of institutional practices such as illegal detentions, torture, and flouted presumption of innocence, etc. and the efficiency of the repression-surveillance system implemented for the purpose of incarcerating innocent persons. French philosopher Michel Foucault urged us to grasp the power dynamics underlying their more visible institutional configurations. We will show that four fields of power cooperate flow together into the phenomenon of wrongful convictions. At the crossroads of the legal and penal apparatuses, law enforcement bodies, the prison complex and the media sphere, a complex process process is taking place before our eyes. It consists in creating a phantasmatic category of sociopaths and natural enemies of the social body, its integrity, and values. Through this conceptual prism, the systemic dimension of the apparent failings of the justice systems comes to light, not to mention it intimate kinship with contemporary forms of violence that are far more subtle than yesterday’s more overtly repressive expressions.
