Saturday, June 21, 2014

Old Bailey Online

 
While looking at the New York Times Online Edition last week I found an article, Computing Crime and Punishment, involving records of trials held at the Old Bailey in London from 1674 to 1913 have now been archived online.

It is an amazing online research resource for English trials for over two centuries:

The corpus includes 121 million words describing 197,000 trials over 239 years. According to researchers, it represents the largest existing body of transcribed trial evidence for historical crime; it is, they say, the most detailed recording of real speech in printed form anywhere in the world.

The article discussed how academics using computers to read the over 2,000,000 words had studied the transformation in England of how crime was treated between the mid-18th and mid-19th Centuries.

The article sets out in 1765 you could be hung for stealing “a watch and a hat” and you could be hung for murder.

Within a century picking a pocket would usually involve a fine.

How England approached crime had changed:

In the early 1700s, violence was considered routine. A trial about theft, Dr. DeDeo said, might include testimony “in which people gouge out each other’s eyes, are covered in blood and get killed.” But by the 1820s, the justice system was focused more on containing violence — a development reflected not just in language but also in the professionalization of the justice system. “The changes occurred under the radar,” said Dr. Hitchcock, the British historian.

What was most interesting to me was learning of the immense record of English criminal trials.

Multiple means of searching trials are possible.

Some trials were deemed inappropriate to report as in Oscar Wilde’s misguided decision to prosecute his lover’s father for criminal libel:

336.   JOHN SHOLTO DOUGLAS, MARQUESS OF QUEENSBERRY , was indicted for unlawfully publishing a false, scandalous and malicious libel of and concerning    Oscar  Wilde. To this the defendant pleaded NOT GUILTY, and put in a plea of justification, stating the contents of the alleged libel to be true in substance and in fact, and that it was published for the public benefit.

SIR EDWARD CLARKE , Q.C., MESSRS. CHARLES MATHEWS and TRAVERS HUMPHREYS, Prosecuted; MESSRS. CARSON, Q.C., C. F. GILL and A. GILL, Defended.

The details of the case are unfit for publication.

At the close of the case for the prosecution, and whilst MR. CARSON was opening the defence, SIR EDWARD CLARKE interposed and stated that he had consulted with his client, and was prepared to accept a verdict of NOT GUILTY , which the JURY at once pronounced, adding that they considered that the publication was justified and for the public benefit.

If you want to read the transcripts from that trial they are available on line through the University of Missouri at Kansas City which has a website on the Trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895.

I have dipping into the Old Bailey Online to see how trials were recorded. I looked at murder trials for the same period of the year in 1675 and 1775 and 1875. My next post will provide my comments on the changing of how trials were reported during those 200 years and aspects of the trials.

16 comments:

  1. How interesting Bill. Will look forward to future post....

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    1. Moira: Thanks for the comment. It was an interesting find on the net for me.

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  2. Bill - I'm so glad these archives are now online. I think it's per se a good thing when knowledge like that is easily available. And you've given some really interesting bits of information from the database. Thank you

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    1. Margot: Thanks for the comment. I think you would find it fascinating to dip into the archives.

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  3. Very interesting, Bill. I remember the publishing company I worked for a few years ago looking into these records... Don't remember the context. Our company has created databases of abstracts of articles from historical serials for use in research in colleges; one of the databases was over 50 years old. The goal would have been to add more content to enhance the databases I am sure, but beyond that I was not involved, and the databases were sold to EBSCO shortly after that.

    Anyway, it still remains a topic of interest to me and I look forward to more on the subject.

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    1. TracyK: Thanks for the very interesting comment. I am always pleasantly surprised by the breadth of knowledge of fellow bloggers. The net just keeps adding information for researchers.

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  4. It's a great resource which I wish had been around when I was an undergraduate. Looking forward to your next post Bill.

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    1. Rich: Thanks for the comment. I would have found it interesting 40 years ago when I was in university. I think it might have proven another self-distraction for me.

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  5. Bill, I look forward to your post on how trials evolved not over decades but over centuries, and possibly the differences in civil and criminal law as practised then and now. This is such a vast subject. I assume English trials set the standard for other countries to follow.

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  6. Prashant: Thanks for the comment. I fear I may disappoint you. I will be touching on some differences but not in depth in a blog post. I hope you take a look at the archive. I expect you would find interesting trials.

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    1. Bill, thanks for your reply. I understand that. I'll go through the archive and particularly read about the Oscar Wilde case and other such cases. My reading of archives is often at the expense of reading books. I enjoy history in general.

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  7. Prashant: Thanks for the further comment. The Old Bailey archives are the raw date of legal history.

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  8. This is interesting, although Britain's very liberal use of the death penalty rather turns me off. It was brutal, even executing poor people who stole food to survive or committed other crimes of survival. Very brutal criminal justice system.

    Poor Oscar Wilde. He went to jail for quite unjust reasons. And he was an absolute genius, who wrote brilliantly.

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    1. Kathy D.: Thanks for the comment. The English judicial system was brutal and cruel for a long time.

      Wilde did not deserve to go to jail. I think he ended up in jail because of his hubris in challenging his lover's father in a libel prosecution which opened up Wilde to being cross-examined on his life and loves. Brilliant he was at writing but at common sense.

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  9. The Irish writer, Cora Harrison, writes a series about a woman judge in the 1500s in what became Ireland. She says in the one book I read in an accusation to an English merchant that the British gave out the death penalty to poor people with no mercy, and she said at the time that her country didn't even have jails.

    I wish I had time to read more of her books. Her points are fascinating.

    And to look at the U.S. today when it took two hours last week to execute a man
    in Arizona -- totally reprehensible. When will this government wake up and join
    the European Union countries and abolish this horrendous act?

    This legal system was based on England's, but the British government abolished
    the death penalty. Way past time to do that here. It just keeps getting crueler.

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    1. Kathy D.: Thanks for the comment.

      I have read one of the books featuring Mara and enjoyed it.

      I recently read 60% of Americans want the death penalty. I do not see the death penalty being abolished in the United States any time in the foreseeable future.

      When I read stories from victim's families, law enforcement and politicians not minding at all the convicted man may have suffered I thought change is not possible. It is the same thinking that led to "enhanced interrogation techniques" under the Bush White House.

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