This article is based upon interviews with prosecutors, defendants and witnesses, who tell that they during court proceedings have identified alliances between other participants. The interviewees understood phrases, gestures, laughter and positions taken in the court-room as a pretext for creation of alliances and explain the perceived fellowship as a result of social homogeneity grounded in categories as class, gender, sexuality or ethnicity. The understanding of these issues or codes of performance that allegedly unify other actors is here seen as a strategy to create safety in uncertain and unfamiliar situations. In this perspective we may say that structural explanations help the interviewee to account for feeling excluded or regarded as untrustworthy. At the same time as alliances are categorized, the individuals construct – as if through the eyes of “the others” – an image of themselves as deviant with regard to race, generation or sexuality. Whether or not the alliances of “the others” had an influence on the judgment, or were aimed to do so, these perceived alliances and their expressions occasionally made the interviewees feel uncomfortable and excluded, and some of them claimed that this sense of being excluded or disrespected had lasted for a long time after the court proceedings.