‘The Forgotten Soul of the Criminal Justice System’. A critical discourse analysis of the legislator’s legitimation of witnesses’ legal position in Sweden

With a starting point in the notion that witnesses are a neglected category of individuals of the criminal justice system, this study critically examines policy discourses within the jurisdictive process regarding witnesses’ legal position. By conducting a discourse analysis with a critical approach, the study analyzes a corpus of textual data comprised by a subset of policy documents on the area released during the period 1990 to 2018, in which policy discourses are produced and reproduced. The study aims to identify the dominating discourses in the representation of witnesses, thus in this study, representation is seen as integral to the legitimation of witnesses’ legal position. The results reveals that in policy discourse, the representation of witnesses mainly pertains to their role within the criminal justice system, and they are thus primarily represented as a requirement to the democratic society. The reason to why witnesses must be protected and provided sufficient support is hence to enable them to deliver proper evidence in investigations and court proceedings. Moreover, the study also critically examines how the conceptualization of witnesses have been utilized over time to legitimize witnesses’ legal position. The conclusions suggest that witnesses’ legal position is legitimized by ideological features such as justice, where the individual needs of witnesses becomes a second priority. The path dependency of policy discourses on witnesses’ legal position is in this way maintained, causing that witnesses remain as a neglected category of individuals of the criminal justice system