A linguagem de uma fraude: análise das falsas confissões atribuídas aos irmãos Naves

Abstract

In the case of the Naves brothers, occurred in Brazil in the first half of the 20th century, it was alleged that they confessed to committing a crime that did not even happened. In this article, we present a linguistic and discursive analysis of the confessions forged and attributed to them, based, from a theoretical-methodological point of view, on previous studies on common characteristics of false narratives in the field of forensic linguistics and on the application of a method inspired by textual criticism. We identified linguistic elements that indicate the falsity of the confessions attributed to the brothers, such as the extremely detailed description of the alleged crime, the presence of mistakes, inconsistencies and contradictions in the discourse and the use of language of uncertainty. We also compared these confessions and verified the presence of echo and patterns of condensation and expansion. Although limited by the nature of the data, this study enriches discussions on how to characterize false confessions in investigative and judicial contexts.