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Getting away with Murder?

Homicide and the Coroners in Nineteenth-Century London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Mary Beth Emmerichs
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Extract

The contentions in this paper arose tangentially from a study of London coroners I began in the summer of 1998. I had intended to examine the verdicts from nineteenth-century coroners’ courts in order to assess the differences in verdicts that might arise depending on whether the coroner was a doctor, a lawyer, or neither. Was a physician more likely to detect murder as a cause of death than a lawyer or a “civilian?” Instead, as I read hundreds of inquest reports and explored the history of the coroners’ courts, I began to realize that no matter who the coroners were, it was rare for any of them to bring in a verdict of “wilful murder,” even in cases that seemed very suspicious to me.

Type
Special Issue: Bloody Murder
Information
Social Science History , Volume 25 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Bloody Murder , spring 2001 , pp. 93 - 100
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2001 

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References

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