"Some mysterious agency": Women, Violent Crime, and the Insanity Acquittal in the Victorian Courtroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although historians have thoroughly examined the evolution of the insanity acquittal as a legal concept, scholars know relatively little about the insanity acquittal in practice. This article attempts to fill that significant gap. How often did defendants plead insanity, how many succeeded, and what factors determined whether or not an insanity plea would succeed? An analysis of thousands of trials for violent crimes in England and Wales between I832-1901 reveals that, while the insanity plea figured in relatively few trials, far more men than women received an insanity acquittal. In proportional terms women were twice as likely to be acquitted on ground of insanity, even when women and men were charged with similar crimes. Why was the legal system more willing to grant insanity acquittals to female defendants? Were these women benefiting from the paternalism of male jurors reluctant to execute women, as many members of the public assumed? Examination of the cases reveals that although juries were supposed to assess insanity pleas according to the M'Naghten Rules, juries often ignored the rules when dealing with female defendants, and based their verdicts on the conclusion that only an insane woman could have committed the crime with which she was charged. This article argues that the conflation of female violence and insanity may have saved many women from the gallows, but it denied women's agency in violent criminal acts and reinforced the negative stereotype of women as mentally and emotionally weak.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".