Negotiating Responsibility: Law, Murder and States of Mind (review)

Elizabeth Tilford was hanged for poisoning her husband on 17 December 1935—sixty-two years after a woman was last executed by hanging in Ontario. Tilford claimed innocence, insisting that the victim's family had framed her. Most people, however, were convinced of Tilford's guilt, although they constructed competing accounts of her motivations for murder and the degree to which she was responsible for her actions. Even though Tilford's state of mind at the time of the crime was an important part of such discussions, no psychiatric experts were called on to give evidence. While informed by psychiatric knowledge, discussions about Tilford's state of mind occurred largely among non-experts and outside of the courtroom.

This case, which opens Kimberley White's ground-breaking work, sets the stage for the author's central argument: that psychiatric experts did not wield the amount of power inside the courtroom that is generally suggested by medical-legal historians. Rather, the author convincingly asserts that a much more nuanced, unstable, complex, and dynamic relationship existed between expert psychiatric knowledge and common-sense understanding, such that the two were often fused and similarly influential. Throughout her book, White disrupts theoretical divisions between expert and common-sense knowledge, demonstrating that while experts were often excluded from the courtroom or played only marginal roles within it, expert knowledge, bound up with common-sense knowledge, informed legal decision making and outcomes in multiple ways.

White's adoption of an interdisciplinary approach and her focus on criminal responsibility, rather than on the more commonly examined concepts of insanity and guilt, help her to establish fresh and important insights about the constant negotiation that occurred between expert knowledge and common-sense knowledge in Canadian law and society. Arguing that expert opinion was most successful when it corresponded with common-sense understandings, she demonstrates "that what was said, and the way in which it was articulated, were usually far more important than who said it" (p. 51).

White empirically supports these claims through a rigorous qualitative analysis of 66 case files—23 women and 43 men—of capital murders that occurred in Canada between 1920 and 1950. In each case the defendant was found fit to stand trial, convicted for murder, and sentenced to death. While 319 individuals fit such criteria, White chose a random sample of men and included all women except for three whose files were unavailable from Library and Archives Canada at the time of her research.

An entire chapter usefully describes the rich and varied contents of the case files and critically discusses their strengths and limitations. White's methodological approach is to regard case files as cultural texts, and her analytical tools are drawn from constructionism and textual analysis. Such an approach allows her to take into account both the broad social and institutional context within which the case files were produced and the unique nature of each individual case, demonstrating that criminal responsibility was a flexible concept, negotiated and renegotiated according to many and varied factors.

Criminological knowledge decisively influenced the outcomes of capital murder cases. White draws on Michael MacDonald's concept of discursive "marketplaces" to demonstrate how particular criminological narratives offered key frameworks through which experts and non-experts negotiated the meaning of state of mind and criminal responsibility. Theories about degeneracy were particularly influential and were modified according to the broader social and political climate. For example, war and poverty were thought to lead to mental deficiency, but typically only among those individuals who did not fit common-sense ideals of British citizenship and character. Chapters 5 and 6 further explore how ideas about degeneracy and their impact reflected racialized, gendered, and class constructs.

White's study ends just prior to the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Laws of Insanity as a Defence in Criminal Cases in 1953, in which the role of the psychiatric expert in Canadian criminal law and the parameters of criminal responsibility were examined. Her research helps to establish not only the...