SAFETYLIT WEEKLY UPDATE

We compile citations and summaries of about 400 new articles every week.
RSS Feed

HELP: Tutorials | FAQ
CONTACT US: Contact info

Search Results

Journal Article

Citation

Dale E. Am. Hist. Rev. 2006; 111(1): 95-103.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, American Historical Association)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Eric Monkkonen notes the odd fact that throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S. legal system tolerated homicide. Monkkonen was not the first to observe the problem; more than a hundred years ago, Horace Redfield argued that many southerners killed because they believed that their local courts would treat them lightly or even let them escape punishment. More recent studies have established that Redfield was wrong to cast this as a distinctively southern phenomenon, but they have borne out his general premise: in the nineteenth‐century United States, the courts tended to punish killers lightly, or not at all. These studies also suggest that when this practice came to an end, as it did around the start of the twentieth century, its demise reflected a shift in procedure, from trials to plea bargaining, not an increased aversion to homicide. But what are we to make of it? In his major study of homicide in New York City, Monkkonen argued that if we are ever going to understand homicide rates in the United States, we must learn why the legal system tolerated murder for so long. As simple as that formulation is, the reality behind it has been so complex as to make uncovering an explanation difficult. The “legal system,” even in a single state, has always been a multi‐headed beast that acts through a number of people and in a variety of ways, which means that the decision to tolerate a particular murder could have occurred at several points in the legal process, for a host of reasons. We need to give careful consideration to what happened at each of those points as we try to determine why and how the legal system responded to homicide the way it did.

NEW SEARCH


All SafetyLit records are available for automatic download to Zotero & Mendeley
Print