“Society Owes Them Much”: Veteran Defendants and Criminal Responsibility in Australia in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Criminal responsibility now forms the subject of a rich vein of socio-historical scholarly work. But finding concrete ways to grasp the social dimension of criminal responsibility has proved challenging. This article presents one way of examining the social dimension of responsibility practices in criminal law: taking a social, rather than a traditional, or typical, legal unit of analysis, it presents a study of returned service personnel charged with serious offenses after returning home to Australia. I argue that, premised on veterans as a distinct social category, ex-soldiers are accorded special status in criminal adjudication and sentencing practices--as “veteran defendants.” The special status of “veteran defendants” has two substantive dimensions: “veteran defendants” as über-citizens, civic models or exemplars, to whom gratitude is owed and who generate responsibility in others involved in the adjudication and evaluation process, on the one hand, and legal persons with “diminished capacity” who have impaired or reduced responsibility for crime, on the other hand. These two substantive dimensions of the specialness of “veteran defendants” are underpinned by a formal quality of “veteran defendants”--that they are “see-through subjects,” both more known and more knowable than other defendants. In the Australian context, there is a historical interplay between the two substantive dimensions of the specialness of “veteran defendants,” with the latter becoming more prominent over time.