Preliminary Programme

Wed 4 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 5 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30
    19.00 - 20.15
    20.30 - 22.00

Fri 6 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 7 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.00 - 17.00

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Wednesday 4 April 2018 16.30 - 18.30
B-4 CRI19 Criminal Offenders in the Twentieth-century Justice System
OSCR Lanyon Building
Network: Criminal Justice Chair: Heather Shore
Organizer: Alana Piper Discussant: Heather Shore
Lisa Durnian, Mark Finnane : True Confessions: their Fall and Rise
In the course of a century between mid-Victorian scepticism and mid-twentieth-century legitimation, the fortunes of the confession waxed and waned. The defendant at a criminal trial in the early Victorian period was buffeted by competing winds. On the one hand, the entitlement to legal defence at trial was an institutional ... (Show more)
In the course of a century between mid-Victorian scepticism and mid-twentieth-century legitimation, the fortunes of the confession waxed and waned. The defendant at a criminal trial in the early Victorian period was buffeted by competing winds. On the one hand, the entitlement to legal defence at trial was an institutional recognition of the prisoner’s rights. On the other, the emergence of the police as criminal investigators in a system of public prosecution arguably disadvantaged the prisoner, especially those vulnerable to police attention by way of poverty, illiteracy or their general way of life. Significant judicial recognition of the prisoner’s vulnerability is seen in the mid nineteenth century in judicial rejection of confessional evidence around which police had not constructed the necessary cautions. Contrast this judicial scepticism with the position one hundred years later when the police verbal had become an art form, challenged intermittently by scandals around wrongful or suspect convictions. This at least is a narrative that might be constructed from an impressionistic reading of the relevant sources, few of which however have rested on a careful historical documentation of the prisoner’s confession. In this paper we will attempt to sharpen the focus by examining evidence about the role of confessions in the conviction of those brought before higher courts in Australia over a period of more than one hundred years. (Show less)

Lisa Featherstone : Medicalising Sexual Offenders: Psychiatry in the Courtroom in Late Twentieth Century Australia
In north American jurisdictions, psychiatry was central to the prosecution and institutionalization of sexual offenders, from the early twentieth century onwards. In Australia, however, medicine was not integral to the legislation, nor, as this paper will argue, to the court processes around sexual offences. This paper will explore the complex ... (Show more)
In north American jurisdictions, psychiatry was central to the prosecution and institutionalization of sexual offenders, from the early twentieth century onwards. In Australia, however, medicine was not integral to the legislation, nor, as this paper will argue, to the court processes around sexual offences. This paper will explore the complex interactions between law and medicine in late twentieth century Australia, drawing upon court cases in Australia’s largest jurisdiction, New South Wales, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Using a range of court transcripts, including trials for rape, sexual offences against children and same-sex offences, it will explore the ways psychiatric evidence was used for offenders at both trial and sentencing. Medical testimony was frequently called: this was part of the modern demand for scientific and technological investigation, and was also an important defence strategy to explain or mitigate the alleged crime. Yet psychiatric testimony was subject to substantial challenge, particularly when it was at odds with the judge and jury’s own beliefs about sexual violence and sexual offenders. By considering the court’s management and utilization of medical testimony – and how this changed over time – this paper will suggest that medical opinion was not necessarily central to understandings of sexual offenders within the Australian courtroom. (Show less)

Arlie Loughnan : Women’s Responsibility for Crime in Twentieth-century Australia
Women’s crime has tested the boundaries of criminal responsibility. The creation of a stand-alone offence/defence of infanticide in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the introduction of a defence of partial self-defence (in New South Wales) and an offence of defensive homicide (in Victoria), in the last decades ... (Show more)
Women’s crime has tested the boundaries of criminal responsibility. The creation of a stand-alone offence/defence of infanticide in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the introduction of a defence of partial self-defence (in New South Wales) and an offence of defensive homicide (in Victoria), in the last decades of the century, indicates that women’s criminal responsibility was problematised across this period. In recent decades, however, the rise of the victims’ movement and radical changes in social ideas about the pre-eminent offence against women – domestic or family violence – have recast women’s crime, reconfiguring the relationship between individual and societal responsibility for women’s offending, at the same time as altering the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. This paper explores these developments, arguing that the ‘mad, bad or sad’ frame (Ward 1999) in which women’s crime has been interpreted traditionally has been overlaid by a frame of ‘failing or failed’, according to which the assessment of individual responsibility is haunted by societal responsibility, which, following Norrie (2014), I conceptualise as a kind of political remainder of criminal adjudicative processes. (Show less)

Alana Piper : Co-offenders before the Courts: the Joinder Effect
It is well established in legal and psychological research that combining multiple charges against a defendant into a single trial event has a tendency to increase conviction chances – this is known as the joinder effect. Legal scholars have long theorised that combining the trials of multiple defendants has a ... (Show more)
It is well established in legal and psychological research that combining multiple charges against a defendant into a single trial event has a tendency to increase conviction chances – this is known as the joinder effect. Legal scholars have long theorised that combining the trials of multiple defendants has a similar effect, disadvantaging co-accused by tainting them with guilt by association. However, little empirical evidence has been presented to demonstrate this. It has further been suggested that the joinder of co-accused defendants became more pronounced during the twentieth century, as judges in common law jurisdictions became increasingly reluctant to increase the courts’ workload by severing trials. Again, this has proved difficult to substantiate though, given the limited historical scholarship on co-offending or co-accused defendants. Drawing on over a hundred years of prosecutions data from Australia, this paper will explore the history of co-offending across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, it will examine the impact that being co-accused had on trial outcomes to consider whether there is a ‘joinder effect’ in multi-defendant trials, and whether it has become more significant across time. In doing so, it will investigate the particular effects of the gender composition of co-accused groups on trial outcomes, and how this was influenced by broader social and legal attitudes. (Show less)



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