Gender and punishment in Ireland

Women, murder and the death penalty, 1922–64

Lynsey Black

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526145307
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Irish History

Gender and punishment in Ireland explores women's lethal violence in Ireland. Drawing on comprehensive archival research, including government documents, press reporting, the remnants of public opinion and the voices of the women themselves, the book contributes to the burgeoning literature on gender and punishment and women who kill. Engaging with concepts such as 'double deviance', chivalry, paternalism and 'coercive confinement', the work explores the penal landscape for offending women in postcolonial Ireland, examining in particular the role of the Catholic Church in responses to female deviance. The book is an extensive interdisciplinary treatment of women who kill in Ireland and will be useful to scholars of gender, criminology and history.

1

Women prosecuted for murder

From 1922 until 1964, 292 women were prosecuted for murder. Of these, only 22 were convicted on this charge, and of these 22, only one was executed. Of the total number prosecuted, the case involved an infant victim in 253 cases, a child in 5 cases and in 34 cases an adult. Table 1.1 gives an overview of prosecutions by year and victim status. Through the 1920s, the 1930s and the 1940s, the most remarkable trend was the stability of the numbers of women before the courts on a murder charge. The Infanticide Act 1949 ushered in a new era of female murder prosecutions by largely removing infant murders from the ranks of those prosecuted. This change coincided with a decade in which very few women were prosecuted for child or adult murder. Ireland in the 1950s, dubbed by Brady as ‘a policeman’s paradise’, remained isolated from the post-war crime increases experienced elsewhere.¹ As O’Donnell noted, homicide levels plummeted to just 1.7 per 1,000,000 in 1954.²

Most of the women charged with murder did not seek to put the state on proof, avoiding the unpredictability of a jury trial. As Table 1.2 shows, while 86 women were tried by jury, 158 pleaded guilty to a lesser, non-capital offence. From this remove, it is a fraught endeavour to speculate on the extent to which such decisions were directed by legal counsel or by the women themselves. The experiences of some, such as the few who pleaded guilty to the capital charge, suggest little guidance from the appointed barristers. Although the legal fiction is that defendants instruct counsel, and that plea decisions remain within the defendant’s domain, it is perhaps more accurate to describe the defendant as a passive actor amid legal professionals.³ Carlen went so far as to term defendants ‘dummy players’ in their own cases.⁴

Table 1.1 Women prosecuted by year and victim status

Table 1.2 Jury trials and pleas, 1922–64

Of those who did not have a jury trial (and had not pleaded guilty to a lesser offence) some were found unfit to plead,⁵ for others a nolle prosequi was entered and they were discharged from court.⁶ Significantly, the numbers of women opting for jury trials collapsed through the 1940s, as it became increasingly likely that women would plead guilty to a non-capital offence.

The pattern in those pleading guilty was skewed by offence type, with clear differences between those charged with murdering an adult and those charged with murdering an infant or child. Of 34 women prosecuted for the murder of an adult, 23 pleaded not guilty at trial. Of the 23 who put their case to a jury, ten were convicted of murder and death-sentenced, ten were found not guilty and discharged from court and three were found guilty of manslaughter. Only four women pleaded guilty to lesser offences, three of whom pleaded guilty to manslaughter while another pleaded guilty as an accessory to murder. A further four were found unfit to plead, one woman’s case was put back and in two cases the state entered a nolle prosequi and the women were discharged from court.

Meanwhile, Table 1.3⁷ sets out the 154 cases of women charged with infant/child murder (predominantly infant murder⁸) who pleaded guilty to lesser offences (of cases for which information is available). The overwhelming majority pleaded guilty to either concealment of birth or manslaughter.⁹ The pattern tells a story of the gradual replacement of concealment of birth by manslaughter. While concealment of birth was considerably more numerous as a plea in the 1920s, it had collapsed in frequency by the 1940s. In the decade in which more women than ever pleaded guilty to a lesser offence, that offence was generally manslaughter. Why did this happen? Manslaughter carried a potentially much harsher sentence, with a maximum penalty of penal servitude for life. In contrast, under section 60 of the Offences Against the Person Act 1861, concealment of birth carried a maximum punishment of two years’ imprisonment with or without hard labour. Despite significant differences in the maximum penalty, there was little difference in the sentences handed down for manslaughter or concealment in cases of infant death (with the caveat that all women sentenced to penal servitude had necessarily been convicted of manslaughter). As the years wore on, it became increasingly likely that women would plead guilty to manslaughter (and then infanticide after 1949).

In many ways, verdicts in infant murder could often appear arbitrary. Judicial discussion of sentencing on this could be insightful; Justice Johnston made two remarks four years apart that highlighted this capriciousness. Although Elizabeth Hannon was convicted of murder and death-sentenced in 1927, Johnston confided to the Department of Justice that had she been convicted of concealment he would have sentenced her to six months’ imprisonment.¹⁰ Four years later, Johnston, in sentencing Mary Kiely to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour following her guilty plea to manslaughter, noted that ‘He had power to impose penal servitude for life, but would not do that, although the sentence must be severe.’¹¹ In many cases, there was little on the facts to distinguish cases as more fitting for a murder conviction, a lesser conviction or an acquittal.

Table 1.3 Women pleading guilty to lesser offences, infant/child murder, 1922–64

Some women, when called upon to plead, pleaded guilty to murder. These few cases seem to demonstrate the intense vulnerability of many women before the courts. In 1924, 18-year-old Isabella Snow, who eventually pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of her infant, had first pleaded guilty to murder:

That plea took the prosecution by surprise, if not by bewilderment. The judge at the last sessions, fearing he would have to accept the plea, put the accused back, for, had he accepted it, there was no other course open to him but to go through the horrible formality of putting on the black cap and imposing the death sentence – a sentence which would not be carried out.¹²

The recent Infanticide Act 1922 (England and Wales) was cited as a reason why a guilty plea should not be accepted. When Snow instead entered a plea to manslaughter, it was accepted by state counsel, who again cited the new legislation across the Irish Sea. While this suggested that Irish courts would henceforth shy away from capital convictions for infant murder, there were to be 12 death sentences for this offence before reform in 1949. It remained the case that if a woman put the state on proof, the jury could find the defendant guilty on the most serious charge.

In cases of infant murder, despite the risk of pleading not guilty and facing the unknown of a jury verdict, a considerable number of women did just that. Arguably, it was not a high-stakes game. The expectation was that women convicted of infant murder would be swiftly reprieved.¹³ However, the strain of the capital verdict for some was extreme.¹⁴ Shown in Table 1.4, for some who opted for a jury trial, it ended more fortuitously. In the 1920s, for women who put the state on proof in adult murder cases, a death sentence was the most likely outcome. However, for infant murder cases, acquittal and discharge from court was most likely....