This paper probes how Kurdish citizens and their lawyers use the criminal courts to record injustices committed by state authorities, turning court files into archives of rights violations in Turkey. It specifically looks at two types of cases processed at Turkish criminal courts: cases regarding smuggler killings from Van borderlands and “terrorist propaganda” cases. In the first set of cases, Kurdish complainants, the families of the murdered smugglers, and their lawyers pursued criminal prosecutions regarding the incidents in which state security forces attacked and killed Kurdish smugglers who crossed the mountainous borderlands across Turkey and Iran. The complaints and lawyers re-utilized state forensics and improvised their own evidence-collection practices to identify the perpetrators and the unlawfulness of the killings. In the second set of cases, the criminal courts prosecuted citizens who made social media statements critical of state security forces and the government under the allegations of “terrorist propaganda.” In these cases, the defendants and their lawyers strived to contest such allegations and reverse the prosecutorial gaze back to the state authorities and courts. In doing so, they re-purposed court documents to critique state violence and biased evidence collection (or non-collection) by the judiciary. Analyzing and comparing these two case categories allows me to ask how different roles that citizens assumed during criminal prosecution (i.e., complainants and eyewitnesses in killing cases and defendants in propaganda cases) shape the use of these courts as alternative archives. As the cases include different types of legal evidence, such as ballistic evidence and digital statements, I also ask how different legal materialities (physical, paper-based and digital) fashion the political uses of courts. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork among human rights lawyers and families of the murdered smugglers in Van province between 2012 and 2014, semi-structured interviews with Kurdish dissidents who faced terrorism propaganda allegations in the diaspora (Canada), and textual analysis of court files. The paper argues that the Kurdish citizens and lawyers utilized the court files to record the state-committed crimes and the legal authorities’ non-collection or selective collection of legal evidence. In doing so, the citizens and lawyers aimed to expose the judiciary’s complicity in these crimes and refuse Turkish courts as the legitimate interlocutor of justice. The paper theorizes a novel way of rights advocacy and engagement with state courts that aims to undermine (rather than reinforce and reproduce) the legitimacy of state law.