@article{ref1,
title="Delivering demons, punishing wives",
journal="Punishment and society",
year="2005",
author="Howe, Adrian and Ferber, Sarah",
volume="7",
number="2",
pages="123-146",
abstract="This article provides an analysis of R v Vollmer and Others, Australia's most famous 'exorcism-manslaughter' case, in which a woman, Joan Vollmer, underwent an 'exorcism' performed by four people, resulting in her death. We examine how taken-for-granted distinctions were collapsed during the resulting trial - distinctions between crime and punishment, exorcism and punishment, church and state, the past and the present, law and religion, reason and unreason and between a demon and a woman. We show how the defence argument for the reality of demonic possession normalized the bizarre, while simultaneously exoticizing the mundane or 'traditional' criminal case involving a husband defendant and a dead wife. The apparent assumption on the part of the police and the media that this case was bizarre serves to veil the fact of its relative ordinariness. A wife is killed, and the lethal punishing violence inflicted on her body downplayed, to be reinterpreted in the legal context as somehow a consequence of something she herself precipitated. Our analysis of the Vollmer case provides a novel perspective on that always intriguing conundrum of crime and punishment.<p />",
language="",
issn="1462-4745",
doi="10.1177/1462474505050438",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1462474505050438"
}