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Book Review
| Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers, editors, Murder on Trial, 1620–2002, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. 279. $ 78.50 cloth (ISBN 0-7914-6377-X) $ 24.95 paper (ISBN 0-7914-6378-8).
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| The volume includes nine contributions organized into three categories: race, mental competency, and gender and class norms. |
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The pieces in the race section span the centuries. John Navin in "Cross-Cultural 'Murther' and Retribution in Colonial New England," examines the cultural, legal, and military conflict between various native peoples and the New England colonies from the 1620s to the 1680s, detailing the "legal imperialism" of the English settlers that matched their geographic expansion. He shows how the legal struggles over who should punish killers, and what law should prevail in homicides, contributed to deterioration of relations between the groups, eventually culminating in King Philip's War and the establishment of English law as predominate in the area. Michael Ayers Trotti's "Jim Crow Justice, the Richmond Planet, and the Murder of Lucy Pollard," shows how one black newspaper both covered and helped to shape the course of justice for four black defendants accused of killing a white woman in rural 1895 Virginia. In many ways this case was the kind that proves the rule; as Trotti concludes, "In the era of Jim Crow justice, it was remarkable and exceptional for innocent blacks to succeed in defending themselves" (78). Dave Lindorff's "Justice Denied: Race and the 1982 Murder Trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal" is tightly focused on the legal questions raised on appeal concerning racial bias in the original trial. He sees Abu-Jamal's trial as evidence of the "strong racial bias against African Americans, Native Americans, and other peoples of color" which has "persisted for over four centuries" (107). |
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The three articles on mental competency reflect the volume's origins in a conference on murder in New England. Nancy H. Steenburg's "Murder and Minors: Changing Standards in the Criminal Law of Connecticut, 1650–1853" looks at the handful of cases where a child, within this jurisdiction, was tried for homicide, detailing the effect of Enlightenment views of childhood on the legal system. At one level Enlightenment thinking marked childhood as special and prompted the law to become less harsh in punishing children who killed, but at another level Enlightenment ideas included "theories of racial stratification" (130) that may have combined with established biases to deny to non-white minors the leniency extended to whites. Lawrence B. Goodheart in "Murder and Madness: The Ambiguity of Moral Insanity in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut," cogently and clearly details how doctors' changing ideas about mental illness interacted with the criminal law. He shows how the doctors' antebellum hopes that the concept of moral insanity "would bring clarity and consensus to the complex legal issues raised by mental illness and personal responsibility" proved to be ill founded (138). Alan Rogers, in "Mad Men and Wronged Women: Murder and the Insanity Defence in Massachusetts, 1844–2000," uses the murder cases that reached the state's highest court to detail the "neglected legal history of the insanity defence in the twentieth century" (157–58). Paralleling developments in other jurisdictions, Massachusetts's Supreme Judicial Court "promoted reform by extending its commitment to the principle that in order to be culpable a capital defendant must have the capability to exercise free will" as determined by the jury (176). |
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The final category of gender and class norms focuses on the nineteenth century. Elizabeth A. De Wolfe's "Murder by Inches: Shakers, Family, and the Death of Elder Caleb Dyer" is a detailed study of the only murder that occurred among the Shakers and one which illuminates one of the areas of struggle between the communal Shakers and the larger society. The Shakers accepted children into the society through indentures and would in the best interest of the children resist a parent's attempts to take them out again. In this case, the Shaker's action resulted in the father killing Trustee Dyer and the subsequent trial and pardon applications turned on "conflicting definitions of family" (199). Laura-Eve Moss, "'He Has Ravished my Poor, Simple, Innocent Wife!': Exploring the Meaning of Honor in the Murder Trials of George W. Cole," utilizes a now mostly forgotten spectacular New York affair to examine the changing nature of honor in the nineteenth-century North, focusing especially on the effects of changing concepts of gender on the understanding of who could have honor and how that honor should be protected. Tiffany Johnson Bidler, in "Bodies of Evidence: Inquest Photography in the Trial of Lizzie Borden," has found a new slant on that much studied case. Her work goes beyond inquest photos to deal with phrenologists' and newspaper artists' representations of Borden. She concludes that if the inquest photos are "Examined in light of turn-of-the century pictorial conventions" that they "allowed the jury to construct an intelligible narrative of feminine passivity," which could only help Borden's cause (239). |
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While the volume does not fit together well, the individual contributions make valuable contributions to the literature on murder in America. |
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| Richard F. Hamm
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| University at Albany, State University of New York |
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