Stern on Victims of Circumstantial Evidence: Murder, Proof, and Wrongful Convictions in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Victims of Circumstantial Evidence: Murder, Proof, and Wrongful Convictions in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction. Here is the abstract.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the flourishing of a genre that today seems almost unbearably hackneyed, predictable, and lifeless. These tales feature a murder, followed by the arrest of an innocent person—usually an upstanding, sincere, and honest young man. In a few stories he is convicted and executed, and the truth comes out later. More commonly, he is spared at the last moment, because the truth emerges just before the execution or at the very end of the trial. These stories propose a wide array of meanings for “circumstantial evidence,” including rumor, motive, and various kinds of physical evidence. This chapter contextualizes these stories in relation to the popular crime writing (fiction and nonfiction) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; offers examples of suspects framed by an enemy, framed by nature, and suspected on very weak evidence; and shows how these tales are related to late nineteenth-century detective fiction. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of People v. Vereneseneckockockhoff (Cal. 1900), an important decision that recapitulates and responds to the basic concerns motivating this genre.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.