{"title":"Wife Murder in Chicago: 1910-1930","authors":"C. Bowman, Ben Altman","doi":"10.2307/1144242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144242","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1910 and 1930, at least 391 women were intentionally killed by their husbands in Chicago. This is a relatively small subset of all the homicides in Chicago over this period, approximately 7297 in all. Nonetheless, it is clear that then, as now, homicide by an intimate partner was a leading cause of the premature death of women. This Article interrogates those 391 deaths for what they can tell us about marital disruption, domestic violence, and the lives of women in early-twentieth century America, and the extent to which they parallel or differ from the recent past. We discuss, among other things, the ethnicity, race, and age distribution of the victims, the apparent motivation for the murders, and the response of the criminal justice system-that is, the verdicts and/or sentences handed out, if any. To understand the implications of this data, we also explore the context in which these crimes occurred - the population changes, broader social and cultural trends that affected both the status of women and the institution of marriage, and the availability of remedies or services for victims of unhappy marriages, including the accessibility of both divorce and assistance for victims of domestic violence. From this examination, we draw a number of broader inferences about the continuing problem of marital violence, including wife murder, and society's response to it.","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"739-790"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144242","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"I Loved Joe, but I Had to Shoot Him: Homicide by Women in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago","authors":"J. Adler","doi":"10.2307/1144248","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144248","url":null,"abstract":"OF THE TWELFTH CENSUS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1900, 187 (1904). During the 1920's the average age at death for African American residents of Chicago was eleven years lower than the average age at death for white residents of the city. See ARNOLD H. KEGEL, DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, CITY OF CHICAGO, REPORT FOR THE YEARS 1926 TO 1930, INCLUSIVE 683 (1931). 127 See Wilson & Daly, supra note 6, at 208. 2002]","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"867-897"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144248","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412863","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Capital Punishment for the Crime of Homicide in Chicago: 1870-1930","authors":"D. Cheatwood","doi":"10.2307/1144247","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144247","url":null,"abstract":"In the criminal justice system, the ultimate and final act in any homicide case is the application of the death penalty. Of course, not all homicides result in a death sentence, and not all homicide offenders are sentenced to death. As a consequence, the question of which offenses and which offenders merit a death sentence has always been central to the concern over whether capital punishment should be used at all. On the one hand, as times change and the criminal justice system changes with them, we would expect corresponding changes in the application of the death penalty. On the other hand, if capital punishment is rooted as fundamentally in the racial and economic inequities of society as some have argued, then even over a century we might see far more similarities than differences in how many offenders are sentenced to death, who they are, and for what kinds of homicides.","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"843-866"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144247","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Firearm Deaths, Gun Availability, and Legal Regulatory Changes: Suggestions from the Data","authors":"Greg S. Weaver","doi":"10.2307/1144246","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144246","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"823-842"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144246","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Understanding infanticide in context: Mothers who kill, 1870-1930 and today","authors":"M. Oberman","doi":"10.2307/1144241","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144241","url":null,"abstract":"As a result of these conditions [poverty, stigma, joblessness, the absence of daycare, etc.], the mother very frequently seeks to relieve herself of the child's care by turning heaven and earth to get rid of it honorably, and if this fails, abandons it or takes its life.I","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"707-737"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144241","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Life Terms or Death Sentences: The Uneasy Relationship between Judicial Elections and Capital Punishment","authors":"R. Brooks, S. Raphael","doi":"10.2307/1144239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144239","url":null,"abstract":"One day Louise Harris approached her lover, Lorenzo \"Bo Bo\" McCarter, with a proposition that led to an agreement to kill her husband.' Harris and McCarter paid Michael Sockwell and Alex Hood one hundred dollars to carry out the gruesome killing.2 Following the killing, Harris, McCarter, Sockwell, and Hood were all convicted of capital murder in separate proceedings. In each case, a jury recommended life in prison without parole. Yet, in two of the four cases, the trial judge declined to follow the jury recommendations, choosing instead to sentence the defendants to death by electrocution. Different sentences following guilty verdicts on the same offense often occur because the \"guilty/not-guilty\" determination affords only the crudest approximation of culpability. Through sentencing, however, mitigating and aggravating considerations can give countenance to culpability. Still, the juries in the Harris murder cases had access to these considerations when they reached the same sentence recom-","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"609-639"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144239","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lunatics and Anarchists: Political Homicide in Chicago","authors":"Edward Burke","doi":"10.2307/1144243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144243","url":null,"abstract":"As a former member of the Chicago police department, a practicing Chicago attorney and longtime member of the Chicago City Council, I am intrigued by political homicide in Chicago. The colorful mayhem and peculiar prairie personality of Chicago provides us with no lack of curious cases and characters on which to focus our investigations. Over the past three decades I have had a front row seat from which to observe that home grown Chicago phenomenon known as \"political suicide.\" I am sure you too can recall those fascinating episodes of local politics in which notable Chicago politicians have crashed and burned. Often we can identify the telltale wounds that have resulted as largely being self-inflicted. You might remember the surprise snowstorm in early 1979 during the tenure of Chicago Mayor Michael Bilandic. Many Chicagoans found themselves trapped by the blizzard-like conditions and were enraged at the weather. Chiding Mayor Bilandic for not being fast enough to remove the snow, the storm became the vehicle for the Mayor's ousting during the election that ironically followed on the heels of the storm.","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"42 1","pages":"791-804"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144243","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Homicide in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago","authors":"E. Monkkonen","doi":"10.2307/1144245","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144245","url":null,"abstract":"Homicide rates are understood in large part by comparison. Almost without thinking we compare this year to last, this place to that. Usually we make modest leaps in time and space, taking adjacent sites and time periods in an effort to hold constant otherwise uncontrollable factors. But, in keeping the comparisons modest, we may lose the leverage necessary to make sense of rates. Simply put, the theoretical questions we must address are very different if the United States has always had rates and short term variations similar to those of the present as opposed to completely different ones. If, for example, the highs of 1990 and the lows of 1999 represent a range within which rates have always fluctuated, then the objects to be explained are customary and normal. If, on the other hand, they are extraordinary, or occur only in particular times and places, the explanatory task is very different. Establishing American homicide rates for a wide range of times and places is fundamental to our understanding of homicide. As a beginning of this effort, this paper reports on reconstructed homicide rates from six large and representative cities for 1900, and for what were the nation's two largest cities-Chicago and New York City-over a long span. In order to compare homicide rates from places separated by long distances in time or space, one must take more care than is customary to make data similar.' Comparing this year's count to last","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"809-822"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144245","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412803","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Homicides among Chicago families: 1870-1930","authors":"R. Chilton","doi":"10.2307/1144249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144249","url":null,"abstract":"There are at least two exciting aspects of the files available to the authors of this volume. One is the age and range of the data-the fact that these accounts of Chicago homicides cover a sixty-year period that starts in 1870.1 In addition, these historical accounts of deaths reported to the Chicago police contain a surprising amount of detail. Because of the amount of detail and number of cases available, we can focus on family homicides-homicides where the victim and offender are related by birth or marriage, by more or less permanent living arrangements, or by some apparent degree of emotional attachment combined with a desire or plan to create a family. One obvious question about these cases concerns the extent to which family homicides have changed over the sixty-one year period for which information is available. Another obvious question concerns the ways in which these earlier family homicides are different from or similar to contemporary accounts of family homicide. Any comparison of these accounts with contemporary studies will be complicated by the definitions of family homicides that are used. One contemporary approach to the use of very similar information focuses on intimate partner violence or violence by intimates. \"Intimates\" in these studies have generally referred to people who are husbands, wives, boyfriends, or girlfriends.2 Other family members are ignored in this focus on intimates. In part, this approach probably reflects a concern for male violence against women. Although the intimate partner studies include discussions of homicides committed by women, much of the emphasis in them is on the victimization of women. Another reason some researchers have limited the discus-","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"899-916"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144249","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword to Lunatics and Anarchists: Political Homicide in Chicago","authors":"L. Bienen, T. J. O'Gorman","doi":"10.2307/1144244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/1144244","url":null,"abstract":"The facts of the case as reported here are confirmed by several independent sources, including copies of original records obtained from the Office of the Clerk of Criminal Court of Cook County1, and from other sources. The original records were obtained from the Office of the Clerk of the Criminal Court of Cook County included the following: The case was Case No. 33802, People v. Prendergast, and the jury verdict was filed December 29, 1893. The records include the original typed instructions on the law to the jury, including the instructions on the imposition of the penalty of death and the instructions on the insanity defense. The original record includes the signed verdict sheet finding the defendant guilty of murder and fixing the sentence at death, signed by the twelve jurors and certified by John C. Schubert, Clerk. The record also includes several medical opinions and notes. One note on medical stationery dated December 15, 1893, directed to the State's Attorney Jacob Kern, by Dr. Brower finds the defendant: \"insane (medically) and that the form of insanity if paranoia As to his legal insanity, which as I understand it, is about synonymous with","PeriodicalId":47821,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology","volume":"92 1","pages":"805-807"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2002-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/1144244","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68412792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}