Courts as accomplices: Enabling police torture in the Brazilian juvenile justice system

How do judges respond to torture committed by law enforcement officers against court-involved youth apprehended in flagrante delicto ? Although such violence remains under-reported and courts rarely act decisively, this paper directly examines how magistrates address these allegations during initial hearings. Drawing on non-participant observation of 185 initial hearings and 19 semi-structured interviews with juvenile court judges from six Brazilian capitals, the analysis identifies three mechanisms through which the judiciary sustains impunity for police torture: judicial silence, through which allegations are left unrecorded or procedurally bypassed; moral displacement, through which attention is redirected from police conduct to the character and behaviour of adolescents and their families; and bureaucratic neutralisation, through which formal legal language transforms reports of violence into administratively inert records. Together, these mechanisms reveal that the problem is not one of institutional failure but of institutional functioning: Courts do not merely fail to prevent police abuse – they participate in its normalisation by absorbing it into bureaucratic routine.