Handling Criminal Cases: On the Interactions between Danish Criminal Justice Agencies and Defendants, Prisoners, and Victims

Louise Victoria Johansen
Associate Professor, University of Copenhagen

Social & Legal Studies recently published my article, ‘‘Impressed’ by Feelings – How Judges Perceive Defendants’ Emotional Expressions in Danish Courtrooms’, in the April 2019 print issue. The article presents some of my findings from a 3-year project about the articulation of differences within the Danish criminal justice system. It considers how judges perceive defendants’ emotions, and how these perceptions are influenced by expectations and evaluations according to defendants’ different social positions. Judges meet defendants with specific norms about how one should express feelings depending on one’s age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Using emotions as a lens gave my project the possibility of studying how categorization processes happen through specific social situations such as court trials, and through linguistic and bodily communication. The concept of ‘emotion’ thus offers a dynamic approach to intersecting categories such as gender, age, etc. by highlighting the processes through which they come about.

In the following, I reflect on the broader project that this article was embedded in, and subsequently, what the project brought with it.