Murder on Trial, 1620-2002 (review)

The three editors open this collection with an introductory essay on "Adjudicating Homicide: The Legal Framework and Social Norms," which ranges over nearly four centuries in British North America and the United States. On the one hand, they trace the development of formal criminal-justice systems, from the different codes and procedures of seventeenth century Virginia and Massachusetts through the late eighteenth-century establishment of state and federal constitutions to the policies of the near present. This part is a story, mostly, of expanding rights granted to defendants. The process moved slowly but strongly through the colonial period, rapidly in the early states, and slowed down again until the 1860s and the Fourteenth Amendment. The "due process" clause first inspired procedural changes, and, almost a century later, demanded them, once the United States Supreme Court determined that the federal Bill of Rights should extend to the states.

The authors also point out that "changing community ideas about insanity, the development of children, gender roles, and racism have affected the law" (3). In broadest outline, legal reform has been driven by changing contemporary mores, notably by the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment and by the expansion of democracy to include not only white male defendants but women and minorities. Yet, even apart from some backing and filling—notably about capital punishment—at the case level the black-letter law has often in effect been subverted by prosecutors, judges, and juries, all with biases of their own involving not only the usual academic trio of race, class, and gender but also in this context mental competency, the four subjects of the chapters to follow.

As a guide to the history of murder jurisprudence, the opening essay is a model of concision and clarity. But its very comprehensiveness makes it a little misleading as an introduction to this particular collection, in that only two of the nine individual chapters reach past this geographical bound and/or the nineteenth century. But, with this caveat, the volume as a whole should be useful to students in criminal-justice programs. Five of the contributions, by Elizabeth De Wolfe, Lawrence Goodheart, Dave Lindorff, Alan Rogers, and Nancy Steenburg, build on, or are taken from, full-length books already published or nearly published. If, accordingly, the versions published in this collection are not the most authoritative now available, and the other pieces, by less established authors, are not truly pathbreaking in themselves, they all serve as useful guides to a number of relevant and interdisciplinary topics. Taken together, they sketch, either as case studies or short surveys, the differences among English, colonial, and Native American systems of justice; the conflict among legal, medical, and popular definitions of insanity; the question of mens rea in minors; and the impacts, positive and negative, of race, class, and gender in determining the outcomes of murder trials.