Criminal justice professionals find parental homicides and severe physical assaults of their children difficult to prosecute for a variety of technical reasons. Legal difficulties may be compounded by the conversion of the social problem occurring on the societal and institutional level into a strategy of defense. Analysis of discourses of criminal trials of child abuse and child homicide offenders suggests that there is a possibility that social and structural injustices are deployed as resources by the defendants, creating a situation that has potentially compromising effects on the integrity of the criminal justice process. This paper is based on a larger study of courtroom discourses involved in the trials of parents accused of homicide or severe physical abuse of their children. Examined here is one venue of a societal response to parental violence against a child, the criminal trial. Data were collected from qualitative information gathered from courtroom observations, interviews with court personnel, and from the transcripts of trials of defendants; three trials figure prominently, all involving young African-American men as defendants. Notes and references