Abstract
ABSTRACTIn 1779, Thomas Jefferson proposed the use of nose-cutting to punish women convicted of specific offences, and the use of retaliation (lex talionis) for anyone who deliberately disfigured another person. These punishments were intended to replace the death penalty for these crimes, and as such formed part of Jefferson's attempt to rationalise the Virginian law code in line with eighteenth-century reform principles. Jefferson drew on British laws from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Coventry Act for his bill, but his proposals contrast strikingly with British movements away from corporal marking as punishment used against their own citizens. This article examines the origins and fates of equivalent crimes and punishments in the law codes Jefferson examined, and compares the legal and wider connotations of facial appearance and disfigurement that made these proposals coherent in Virginia when they had long ceased elsewhere. Tracing examples and discussion of these intersecting cases will greatly increase our understanding of Jefferson's proposals, and the relationships between facial difference, stigma and disability in eighteenth-century America.
Highlights
In, Thomas Jefferson proposed the use of nose-cutting to punish women convicted of specific offences, and the use of retaliation for anyone who deliberately disfigured another person
Jefferson drew on British laws from the AngloSaxon period to the Coventry Act for his bill, but his proposals contrast strikingly with British movements away from corporal marking as punishment used against their own citizens
Announcing that Thomas Jefferson ( – ) proposed boring a hole in the noses of women convicted of certain moral offences, and introducing an eye-for-an-eye system of retaliation for anyone who disfigured any other person, tends to provoke a strong reaction
Summary
Announcing that Thomas Jefferson ( – ) proposed boring a hole in the noses of women convicted of certain moral offences, and introducing an eye-for-an-eye system of retaliation (lex talionis) for anyone who disfigured any other person, tends to provoke a strong reaction. Even among those who see paradox in the author of the Declaration of Independence promoting equality of humanity while owning slaves, the punishments put forward by Jefferson in his proposed overhaul of capital offences in Virginian criminal law seem strange and anachronistic for a man thought preoccupied with eighteenth-century tastes for civility and legal reform.
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