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Sources of Public Response to the Death Penalty in Britain, 1930–65

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2016

Lizzie Seal
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Abstract

This article by Lizzie Seal is adapted from a presentation given at the Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice socio-legal research workshop that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in November 2015. It explores the selection of qualitative sources for a project that aimed to uncover public responses to capital punishment in the mid twentieth-century. The article discusses which sources were selected and considers their strengths and weaknesses. It concludes that the particular sources chosen as data can, in themselves, help to shape researchers’ thinking about their findings.

Keywords

public responsedeath penaltycapital punishmenthistorical sources
Type
Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice Research
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 2016 , pp. 91 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2016. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

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References

Footnotes

1 Christian Boulanger and Austin Sarat, ‘Putting Culture into the Picture’, A Sarat and C Boulanger, The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishment, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005, pp. 1–9.

2 See for example Strange, Carolyn, ‘Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and the Death Penalty in Australia, 1890–1920’ British Journal of Criminology, 2003, 43, 2, 310–339CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Benjamin Fleury-Steiner, ‘Death in “Whiteface”’, C J Ogletree Jr and A Sarat (eds.), From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State, New York, New York University Press, 2006.

3 Seal, Lizzie, ‘Imagined Communities and the Death Penalty in Britain, 1930–65’, British Journal of Criminology, 2014, 54, 5, 908–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See Lizzie Seal, Capital Punishment in Twentieth-Century Britain: Audience, Memory, Justice, London, Routledge, 2014, pp. 21–7.

5 Roger Hood and Florence Seemungal, ‘Public Opinion on the Mandatory Death Penalty in Trinidad’, A Report to the Death Penalty Project and the Rights Advocacy Project of the University of West Indies Faculty of Law, 2011: http://www.deathpenaltyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Public-Opinion-on-the-Mandatory-Death-Penalty-in-Trinidad-Report-Final.pdf and Burgason, Kyle A and Pazzani, Lynn, ‘The Death Penalty: A Multi-level Analysis of Public Opinion’, American Journal of Criminal Justice, 2014, 39, 4, 818–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 ‘History of Mass Observation’, Mass Observation: http://www.massobs.org.uk/about/history-of-mo.

7 Langhamer, Claire, ‘“The Live Dynamic Whole of Feeling and Behaivor”: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Emotion, 1945–157’, The Journal of British Studies, 2012, 51, 2, 416–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 418.

8 Report on Survey, Correspondence 1956, Capital Punishment Survey 1955–6, MOA-72-2-A.

9 ‘Listen to the Century Speak’, BBC News, 17.5.00: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/752209.stm.

10 See Adrian Bingham, Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life, and the British Popular Press, 1918–1978, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 16–18.

11 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1987, p. 5.

12 Langhamer, ‘The Live Dynamic’, pp. 425–6.

13 Seal, Lizzie, ‘Ruth Ellis and Public Contestation of the Death Penalty’, The Howard Journal, 2011, 50, 5, 492–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Franklin, Caroline, ‘Introduction: The Material Culture of Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing’, Women's Writing, 2014, 21, 3, 285–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 287.

15 Seal, Capital Punishment, pp. 167–81.

16 See Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2012.