Non-criminal murders: A sociological essay about the use of self-defence in Argentina

This article seeks to examine the use of the figure of self-defence in the practices of the Buenos Aires criminal justice system. As we will show with the analysis of some paradigmatic cases, through the use of this exceptional figure, this criminal justice system produces certain murders as non-criminal acts to, paradoxically, safeguard individual life as a hegemonic value. Moreover, we will observe that the use of this legal figure reveals that killings to protect private property may not have a criminal character either. This in turn suggests that private property is also a hegemonic value for this criminal justice system, and that the allegedly supremacy of individual life over private property in its value scale should be at least questioned.