Patterns Of Prosecution Research Articles

A Game of Norms

While the treatment of migrants in the criminal justice system has recently been designated one of the most relevant research directions in the history of crime, scholarship on the period before the nineteenth century and outside of England or Holland remains far and few between. This article offers a first exploration of the role of offenders’ geographical origins in the administration of criminal justice in an early modern Italian city. It scrutinizes patterns of prosecution and sentencing for three distinct types of crime (pauper mobility, theft, and violence) brought before Bologna’s secular criminal court in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. By doing so, it reveals both the variability of repertoires of inclusion and exclusion across the spectrum of criminalized behaviours, and the different stages at which a migrant past could pose a disadvantage in the personalized game with the norms we call early modern criminal justice.

The crowd’s two faces: keeping the peace and fearing the stranger in late medieval Flanders

ABSTRACT This article examines the reputation of crowds in relation to judicial practice in fifteenth-century Flanders. Medieval chronicles tend to frame rebellious crowds as frighteningly irrational rather than strategic in order to discredit the political movements they described. Legal records from Bruges and Ghent suggest this stereotype extended to disturbances unrelated to revolt. Bailiffs’ accounts and banishments reveal concern for neighbourhood unrest and sudden violence stemming from interpersonal disputes as well as political action. Although bailiffs pursued individuals for instigating conflicts, the crowd played an important role in judicial practice, from investigations to executions, affirming legal decisions and preserving urban peace. These contrasting stereotypes affected patterns of prosecution in fifteenth-century Bruges and Ghent. Bailiffs tended to place blame on individual instigators when the crowd acted against the interests of law enforcement. As the reputation of the crowd was law-affirming, the riotous crowd had to stem from an outside, corrupting influence.

Violence, The Nuclear Family, and Patterns of Prosecution in Late Medieval Flanders

In fifteenth-century Flanders, family mattered in the resolution of violent conflicts. Despite a complex judicial bureaucracy, peace agreements between families still played a role in urban justice, and groups of family members often shared guilt collectively for violent crimes. Statistics from bailiff accounts as well as naming conventions suggest that it was the nuclear family, in particular, that was important. By the sixteenth century, however, the landscape of urban justice had shifted and the family no longer played such a large role. Violent crime was increasingly seen as a challenge to state authority, as opposed to a conflict between two families. However, this movement away from a more “medieval” form of justice, characterized by financial penalties and familial reconciliation, to an early modern punishment-focused system did not undermine the value of the nuclear family. The work of the executioner, 1400-1520, served to strengthen family ties by reinforcing hierarchies within the family, rather than weakening them.

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Selected Developments in Biotechnology Law and the Biotechnology Industry

Punishing Mothers for Men\u2019s Violence: Failure to Protect Legislation and the Criminalisation of Abused Women

This article explores the gender dynamics of ‘causing or allowing a child to die’, contrary to the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, section 5. This offence was intended to allow for prosecution where a child had been killed and it was uncertain who had killed him/her, but also to allow for prosecution of non-violent defendants who failed to protect him/her. More women than men have been charged and convicted of this offence signifying a reversal of usual patterns of prosecution and conviction. This analysis interrogates how section 5 criminalises women who have experienced domestic abuse. Drawing on a case observation, reported cases and media reports of cases, I suggest this offence derives from and perpetuates patriarchal constructs of motherhood. Grounded in a feminist approach building on women’s concrete experiences of law, I conclude that section 5 should be amended so that it is only used where it cannot be ascertained which defendant actively harmed a child.

Peranan Kepolisian Dalam Menanggulangi Tindak Pidana Pungutan Liar Di Lembaga Pendidikan (Studi Pada Polresta Barelang)

In the case of extortion ever happened in the city of Batam. The extortion is in the process of Accepting New Students at SMPN 10 Batam City. The indications of PPDB fraud have actually become suspicion in the community, but in law enforcement in the case of extortion is quite complicated because it is designed systematically in such a way that it will be difficult later in the proof process. Obtained evidence in the form of Money, Proof of Acceptance of New Students, and SK. This investigation is in accordance with KUHAP Article 1 Paragraph (19), the investigation which took place at SMPN 10 Batam City was said to be caught red-handed, the suspect was found at that time. The obstacles of the police in this illegal levy are: Lack of information from the public about the crime of illegal levies and is covered up in carrying out illegal levies at schools, thus hampering the police. Efforts that can be made by the police are to appeal to each agency regarding legal sanctions when committing illegal levies and carrying out patterns of prosecution or punishment against illegal levies based on the legal provisions in the prevailing laws and regulations.

The End of Sodomy: Law, Prosecution Patterns, and the Evanescent Will to Knowledge in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, 1770–1830

Abstract This article analyses discourses concerning male same-sex sexuality produced in the context of law and policing in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands between 1770 and 1830. Intervening in the debate over the making of “the homosexual” and the change from homosexual “acts” to “identities,” I argue that shifts in sexual discourses were not linear. In the late eighteenth century, the courts and the police displayed a strong “will to knowledge” in same-sex sexual matters, collecting, requesting, and recording discourses on inclination and, in some regions, even innateness. This will to knowledge all but disappeared in the early nineteenth century, when in the aftermath of the official decriminalization of sodomy, same-sex sexual acts became mostly devoid of further meaning in legal and police records. The emergence of sexual discourses was therefore uneven.

Victimization Narratives and Courtroom Sexual Politics: Prosecuting Male Burglars and Female Pickpockets in Melbourne, 1860–1921

Burglary and pickpocketing were the two most prevalent forms of male and female offending, respectively, in the flourishing colonial capital of Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article compares the prosecution patterns and public perceptions of male burglars and female pickpockets. Both offences were associated in the Anglophone world with membership of the criminal classes and in the colonial context with concerns about a remnant convict populace. Moreover, both male burglary and female pickpocketing occurred in intimate contexts that threatened the possibility of sexual violence or uncontrolled female sexuality. Yet although both crimes were the subjects of community concerns, the conviction rates for burglary and pickpocketing differed dramatically. This article examines the ways in which the gendered contexts of burglary and pickpocketing—in relation to constructions of victims as much as defendants—exacerbated the usual differences found in trial outcomes for men and women, as well as other factors that served to place men at far greater risk of conviction. It is suggested that a close reading of the victimization narratives of these two offences complicates traditional perspectives on the policing of male and female sexualities in the criminal justice system.

Spatial Dimensions of Racial Inequality

While scholars have noted that The War on Drugs has disproportionately impacted Black and Latino communities, we have little understanding as to how spatial patterns of prosecution and sentencing drive these inequalities. This article explores the geography of race in drug prosecutions by examining the role of neighborhood racial/ethnic and other demographic characteristics on sentencing outcomes for drug defendants in Sacramento, CA. We examine both the rate and length of sentences by block group. Specifically, we first estimate models for the number of prison, jail, and probation or fine sentences as rates per population and as rates per filing. We find that felony drug defendants in Black neighborhoods are penalized after filing through an increased rate of prison sentences per filing, although they do indicate a higher but not statistically significant rate of sentences per population as well. On the other hand, initial patterns of filing primarily drive sentencing in Latino neighborhoods. While the rate of prison and probation sentences differs based on the racial and ethnic neighborhood composition, it largely does not impact sentence length.

Policy Innovations, Political Preferences, and Cartel Prosecutions

Though antitrust cartel cases have received significant attention, the policy determinants and the political preferences that guide such enforcement remain understudied. We empirically examine the intertemporal shifts in U.S. cartel cases during the period 1969–2013. This period has seen substantive policy innovations with increasing penalties that are related to fines and jail terms. There appear to be four distinct cartel policy regimes: pre-1978, 1978–1992, 1993–2003, and 2004–2013. Our empirical estimates show significant variation in the number of cartel cases initiated and the penalties imposed across the policy regimes. The more recent regimes are characterized by far fewer cartel cases initiated, but with substantially higher penalties levied on firms and individuals. While effective deterrence is one explanation for these patterns, we are more inclined to conclude that U.S. cartel enforcement has seen an underlying shift away from focusing on smaller cartels to larger and multinational cartels. In terms of political effects, our results reveal no clear inter-political party effect, but there appear to be interesting intra-political party effects. We find that particular Presidencies matter for cartel enforcement, and variation across Presidential administrations led to marked shifts in the total number of cartel cases initiated. Overall, the shifts in the prosecution patterns portray changing policy priorities and a search for the optimal enforcement design to curtail one of the clearest sources of welfare loss, collusion.

“Spineless Judges and Shyster Lawyers”: Criminal Justice in New Orleans, 1920–1945

Focusing on the prosecution of homicide cases, this essay analyzes the operation of the criminal justice system in New Orleans from 1920 through 1945. Despite the far-ranging legal and institutional developments of the era, few homicide suspects were convicted—only 17.8 percent. Race-based patterns of prosecution and conviction, however, diverged during this period. For white suspects, conviction rates dropped by one-third, while for African American suspects they tripled, rising from half the white rate to double the white homicide conviction rate, as the New Orleans criminal justice system emerged as a key tool to fend off challenges to Jim Crow.

Legislating against hatred: meaning and motive in section six of the Race Relations Act of 1965.

The Race Relations Act of 1965 has been remembered by historians as one prong of a governmental strategy to deal with the impact of black and Asian post-war immigration to Britain, an attempt to improve inter-group relations at the same time as efforts were being made to restrict Commonwealth immigration. This iconic Act was the first to criminalize racial discrimination and outlaw the incitement of racial hatred. This article focuses on the creation and use of one part of this new law, Section Six, the incitement clause. It argues that early patterns of prosecution under this legislation reveal a government agenda which was not solely focused on the protection of black and Asian Britons but instead on longer-running issues relating to the tolerance of political violence. Far from simply outlawing racism, this article argues that the incitement clause ultimately enabled a re-articulation of racial discourse, tweaking the linguistic parameters of racist agitation while consciously allowing for its continuation. In doing so, it reflected a nation which was still unsure about the merits of multiculturalism, where it remained largely acceptable to argue that black and Asian Britons did not belong.

"Crimes which startle and horrify": Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violence in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900

R a p e i s a t r o u b l i n g a n d e l u s i v e s u b j e c t . As a crime it has been defined in Anglo-American law as the carnal knowledge of a woman by force and against her will (and, until recently, by a man other than her husband). Conflicting accounts of “force” and “will,” however, make rape a prime example of the difficulty of fixing “truth” in light of multiple perspectives on an event. As feminist theorist Sharon marcus has argued, rape is as much a linguistic as a physical act. The history of rape, then, consists in large part of tracking the changing cultural narratives that define which women may charge which men with the crime of forceful, unwanted sex and whose accounts will be believed. These rape narratives also have political import. In the late nineteenth-century United States, they served to shore up white male privilege through constructions of dependent women and dangerous African Americans, groups that remained excluded from full citizenship rights because of their alleged incapacity for self-government. The abundant reports of rape, outrage, ravishment, and seduction in nineteenth-century American newspapers offer rich cultural clues to the popular dissemination of these narratives of sexual violence. While recent studies of criminal justice records reveal racial patterns of prosecution and

Road Traffic Offending and an inner London Magistrates’ Court (1913-1963)

This article examines the impact of the growing number of prosecutions for road traffic offences at Clerkenwell Court in central London. The average number of cases heard in each courtroom remained stationary and additional traffic prosecutions were accommodated by reductions in prosecutions for drunkenness or disorderly behaviour and for regulatory offences. This change in police prosecution policy impacted on the court’s proceedings and increased the court’s workload because motorists were more likely than drunks to argue their cases and to employ legal representatives. Sentencing patterns, the memoirs of magistrates and court clerks and other published documents indicate that the court staff viewed traffic offending as essentially ‘regulatory’ and distinguished it from ‘serious crime’ except when somebody was killed or a court order was ignored. The court prioritised its own resources to deal with ‘serious crime’ at the expense of traffic prosecutions. The results of this study support Howard Taylor’s thesis that resource constraints had an important influence on police prosecution policies, but show that not only police resources but also court resources and the discretionary powers of individual magistrates were important factors in prosecution patterns.

Arresting Nudes in Second Empire Paris

This paper concerns two collections of photographs made in Paris during the 1850s and 1860s. The first archive was assembled by the Paris police in the course of enforcing laws against the production and distribution of obscénités. These photographs were pasted into an official arrest register and served as legal evidence. The second collection, a set of stereographs made by Auguste Belloc for clandestine commercial distribution, was seized in a police raid but never inserted into the register. The author analyzes the evolving style of the photographs in these collections, correlating the changes with patterns of prosecution documented in public records. The study reveals the intricate relationship between photography and modern notions of gender, identity and the imaging of sex.

‘Bringing great shame upon this city’: sodomy, the courts and the civic idiom in eighteenth-century Bristol

During the 1730s, Bristol acquired an unenviable reputation as a city in which sodomy was endemic and rarely punished by the civil power. Although the cause lay partly in difficulties experienced in securing convictions, the resolve of magistrates was exposed to fierce scrutiny. Taking an effusive curate's moral vindication of the city as a starting point, this article examines the social production of sodomy in eighteenth-century Bristol, analyses prosecution patterns and considers the importance of collective moral reputation in the forging of civic history.

Comment on Comments

It is a rare pleasure to have three excellent scholars read comment on one's book think about its implications for sociolegal studies. Each of these commentaries makes valuable suggestions for expanding developing a sociolegal studies framework that incorporates history. Some suggestions would have improved the book, while others point to new projects that could contribute theoretically methodologically to developing an historical approach to sociolegal studies. In his insightful essay, Bill Maurer reminds us that in the culture equation, we have devoted far more attention to the analysis of the terms that anchor the equation (law culture) than to the meanings of the and itself. The same is true for law of course. Scholars have challenged the separation into two discrete entities that the and entails, but as Maurer points out, too few have explored what kinds of processes are subsumed under the term. The notion of mutually constitutive relations between culture is an advance over the notion that these are simply separate entities, but this formulation ignores the relative power relations of the two terms along with the complicated ways that one comes to shape the other. It seems similar to issuing mutual restraining orders in cases of domestic violence. In that case, the mutuality indicates that there is some interaction within the violence, but the nature of the blows, their sequence, their provocations, the way each assault changes the conditions for the next blow, are completely effaced in a framework of apparent equality entailed in the notion of mutuality. Similarly, once the interconnectedness of culture are acknowledged, the concept of mutual constitution does little analytic work in disentangling the important questions of power change. These include the relative power of forms of law, enforcement, legal consciousness, legal regulation in forming cultural practices the power of cultural practices to influence channel legal regulations. Maurer suggests that one way to deepen our analysis of the and is to consider techniques of personification reification, to take seriously the objects of such as documents, papers, texts, forms. This is clearly a productive mode of inquiry. These instantiations of legal practice bring a fixity to legal relations which themselves constitute a form of power (see Riles 2004). Thinking about the and over time provides another way of conceptualizing this relationship. Although causality is notoriously elusive, an historical analysis provides at least one way of thinking about how change in one sphere is temporally related to others. One of the advantages of historical research is the possibility of tracing law's changing intervention in everyday life over time with relation to changes to politics, economics, society, as I tried to do with nineteenth-century Hawai'i. Does this mean that the produced culture, or that its changing operations were caused by changes in culture? Not in any simple sense, but it did appear in my research that the was mobilized in different ways at different periods. Although it was often a means to control the social lives of new immigrants, the identities of the immigrants changed. Cultural definitions of groups that appeared dangerous shaped prosecution patterns, while features of these groups' everyday lives, such as smoking opium or gambling, were defined as worthy of legal intervention. These examples show how culture are two sides of a system of power relations. Law is not equivalent to culture but is a distinctive set of institutions, practices, rules used by states to exert control over everyday social life. Although law's rules, institutions, practices are culturally formed, their exercise plays a particularly powerful role in forming the rules practices of everyday life. Because is linked to state power, culture are not two equal entities but fundamentally unequal in their access to power. …