In winter 2014, the town of Thohoyandou, South Africa was gripped with panic after a series of rapes and murders. In this area, notorious for its occult specialists and witchcraft, stories began to circulate attributing the violence to demonic forces. These stories were given credence by the young man who was charged with these crimes. In his testimony, he confirmed that he was possessed by evil forces. Taking this story as a point of departure, this article provides an empirical account of the ambivalent ways state sites of criminal justice grapple with the occult in South Africa. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how spirit possession is not easily reconciled with legal methods of parsing criminal liability in courtrooms. And yet, when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains the possibility of bewitchment in public ceremonies of reconciliation. Abstracting from local stories about the occult, this article proposes mens daemonica (“demonic mind”) to describe this state of hijacked selfhood and as an alternative to the mens rea (“criminal mind”) observed in criminal law. While the latter seeks the cause of wrongdoing in the authentic will of the autonomous, self-governing subject, mens daemonica describes a putatively extra-legal idea of captured volition that implicates a vast and ultimately unknowable range of others and objects in what only appears to be a singular act of wrongdoing. This way of reckoning culpability has the potential to inspire new approaches to justice.

The story often told about HIV in South Africa is a celebratory one that foregrounds the relationship between seropositive citizens and health‐care institutions. In the last 20 years, the government has invested heavily in rolling out life‐sustaining antiretroviral medicines to all who need them, making HIV a firm ground upon which many residents claim protections from the state. This article explores the role of medicine in buttressing the carceral state. I propose biocarceral citizenship to characterize the way health‐care entitlements produce new relationships to the criminal legal system, not through active state surveillance but by extending the responsibilization expected of patients to the penal sphere. Drawing from 22 months of ethnographic research carried out in clinics and courtrooms in the town of Thohoyandou between 2014 and 2018, I apply this concept to both those who have experienced rape, for whom reporting to the (carceral) state is a condition of accessing HIV prophylaxis, and to those who are charged with rape, for whom adherence to antiretroviral medicines is used as evidence of weaponizing sickness. In parallel ways, therapeutic responsibilization exposes both groups to state violence. The article takes HIV‐related entitlements as a cipher for theorizing punishment beyond a critique of neoliberalism.