Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (review)

Trial lawyers devote great efforts, through their use of challenges, to craft juries that they believe will be sympathetic to their arguments. A specialized field of jury psychology helps them to play upon jurors’ emotions or personal backgrounds. Attorneys, though they can not control which judge will be hearing their case, know that some judges will be sympathetic and others indifferent or hostile to their client. According to Conley, however, the solid men of property who comprised the juries in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland between 1867 and 1892 responded to homicide cases according to simple notions of “national character,” class behavior, and conventional expectations about gender and family roles. Likewise, judges sentenced harshly or moderately according to such viewpoints. Nineteenth-century judges and juries classified murders under four categories: “as an act of barbarism representative of an alien mentality, a comprehensible response to provocation, as the unfortunate result of a careless moment, or as a fundamental threat to the existing order.” Judges and juries in England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland differed in the way that they placed homicides under these categories; they felt “obligated to demonstrate what their own nation would and would not allow” (209).

Conley delves into the complexities of these responses, tracing general trends from homicide statistics and court reports and bringing them to life with accounts of specific cases. Among her findings are that English judges and juries were actually harsher to respectable citizens who committed murder, believing that they should know better. Contrary to expectations, they were more lenient to working-class killers, often reasoning that they were too uncivilized to help themselves. If the respectable person were a woman, they often found her to be insane. These views were not universal; exemplary executions for murder occurred as well.

In Ireland, jurors regarded premeditated murder as an English characteristic alien to the Irish, and they were lenient toward Irishmen who killed somebody in a “recreational” fight. Since jurors often considered Irish homicides the result of fights between evenly matched men, they thought that only a man who had lost his mind would be capable of killing a weaker woman.

Scots judges and jurors were harsher toward Irish migrants to their country, but in general expected some sort of atonement for a murderer’s sin. Given clear mitigating circumstances, they considered time in jail while awaiting trial sufficient atonement. Because Scots courts often considered women as capable of reason as men, they were less likely to find women insane than English juries were. Wales had few homicides compared to other parts of the United Kingdom. Conley suggests that punishments were more likely to remain under the jurisdiction of local communities than the English-controlled courts.

Conley writes clearly, whether developing her arguments or describing murders. Even those readers who are statistically challenged, however, may well think that the book would have benefited from more tables; the one that Conley provides shows the percentage of convictions and insanity verdicts, and the average sentence for killings according to gender in the four parts of the nineteenth-century U.K. (93). But the lack of numerical data is hardly a major defect. Certain Other Countries is highly recommended for anybody interested in the comparative study of crime and the responses to crime.