Abstract
In the book, Bodies in Evidence, Heather Hlavka and Sameena Mulla present a powerful examination of sexual assault adjudication in the United States. Their elegantly written and poignant analysis reveals the “human costs” (p. 39) of court processes that promise, but rarely deliver, justice. Focusing on how medicolegal evidence and expertise are employed to adjudicate sexual assault, Hlavka and Mulla offer a rich and detailed account of the reproduction of inequalities and cultural narratives about sexual assault, race, gender, sexuality, and forensics in the courtroom. The authors draw on ethnographic observations of 688 court appearances in Milwaukee County courts and interviews with judges, attorneys, jurors, victim advocates, and forensic nurses and scientists. Building on their previous individual and collaborative works on sexual violence, law, and forensics, Hlavka and Mulla combine their anthropological and sociological approaches to reveal the harms embedded in the daily operations of the sexual assault court.
The book’s structure mirrors the stages in sexual assault adjudication. Chapter one details the jury selection process and how attorneys work to elicit jurors’ “common sense” understandings of race, sexual assault, and forensics in ways that reveal what Hlavka and Mulla term the “nomos of sexual assault” (p. 41). Through the process of jury selection, attorneys introduce jurors to cultural narratives about sexual assault, race, gender, sexuality, and forensics, which often hinge upon rape myths and racist tropes about Black women and communities of color. As Hlavka and Mulla show, these narratives are then woven through subsequent stages of the trial.
Victim-witnesses’ testimonies, as Hlavka and Mulla argue in chapter two, are a “spectacle of suffering” (p. 81) in the courtroom. The authors illustrate how attorneys use a variety of techniques to evoke, magnify, and challenge victims’ testimonies. On the stand, victims’ narratives about sexual assault are not their own, Hlavka and Mulla assert, but are instead disciplined and policed by the prosecutors working to amplify their suffering and the defence counsel working to dispute it. Through the testimonies of three Black, female victim-witnesses of different ages, Hlavka and Mulla detail not only the trauma victim-witnesses are forced to endure on the stand, but also the ways in which race and age shape assessments of victims’ credibility and the expectations for how they embody and perform trauma. Hlavka and Mulla argue that the deep distrust of victims’ testimonies of sexual assault sets the stage for other witnesses with varying forms of expertise whose testimonies are used to corroborate the victim’s story.
Unlike the predominantly Black, feminized victim-witnesses who are rarely seen as credible in the courtroom, chapters three to five focus on witnesses who are afforded more credibility. The mostly white, male officers Hlavka and Mulla observed at trial were assumed to be reliable witnesses, even when errors in investigative procedures were noted. Hlavka and Mulla illustrate how when testifying, police draw on the status afforded to law enforcement to present a narrative of sexual assault that is trusted by the court. In contrast to popular depictions of forensic science in news media and crime dramas, Hlavka and Mulla show how forensic nurses and scientists are often charged with the task of explaining the absence of injuries or lack of DNA evidence in sexual assault cases. The authors trace how nurses and scientists perform credibility, objectivity, and expertise on the stand. In chapter four, they detail how nurses map victimized bodies in ways that reproduce heteronormative narratives about sexual assault and female bodies. In chapter five, they explore how scientists present forensic evidence from the defendant’s body in ways that normalize assumptions about the genetic basis of race.
The testimony of the defendant is the subject of chapter six. Hlavka and Mulla examine how tropes about fatherhood are commonly invoked in sentencing hearings in ways that reproduce heteropatriarchal and racialized narratives about the family, masculinity, and communities of color. They illustrate how white fathers’ violence is often cast as the result of individual choices, while the violence of men of color is framed through racist narratives about the failings and pathologies of Black fathers and communities of color.
Overall, this book calls on readers to acknowledge the unchecked harms the court inflicts on victims, defendants, and their families in sexual assault adjudication, and the enduring consequences of the continued reliance on medicolegal evidence and expertise. While focused on courts in Milwaukee, the book speaks to broader trends in sexual assault adjudication across the United States and beyond, and makes insightful and meaningful contributions to feminist and sociolegal studies of rape and carceral systems, technologies, and logics. Amidst increased calls to action to address police brutality, mass incarceration, and gender-based violence in the United States, Bodies in Evidence inspires readers to imagine alternative paths to accountability that do not rely on medicolegal expertise or “spectacles of suffering” in the carceral system.