Entextualization in the textual trajectories of legal discourses in judicial processes of female offenders who seek house arrest in Brazil

In this paper, we analyze the discourse used in a judicial process involving two imprisoned pregnant offenders, one who obtained the benefit of house arrest through Article 318 of Law 3689/41 of the Brazilian Criminal Procedure Code (CPP) and another one who did not. We seek to present, in an ethnomethodological perspective of the text, how entextualization (BAUMAN and BRIGGS, 1990) is linked to the co-production of texts, their trajectories and the contexts of processes that involve such situation and the possible perspectives in the discursive analysis as social practice and applied to the institutional legal language. Thus, we seek to examine how the discourses are co-constructed by the defendants and legal professionals, interpreted, retextualized and entextualized until the sentence. We investigate written discourses and the way they are organized by incorporating aspects of the context (BLOOMAERT, 2001 and 2005) in such a way that the resulting text carries elements of the story initially narrated, as well as elements that present the trajectory of the texts (BLOOMAERT, 2001; CARRANZA, 2010; WORTHAM and RHODES, 2015) and the narratives co-produced by the professionals involved in relation to what was said by the defendants at the beginning and retextualized, recontextualized until the end of the process (ERLICH, 2007 and 2015). Data was generated from the request for house arrest made by the Public Defender of each of the women and the sentence given by the judge responsible for each case. We note that the entextualizations of the crime, even though it is same, are made in different ways by the judges as well as of the laws that grant this alternative penalty for women offenders. This directly influences the sentence.