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The Prosecution Project: Understanding the Changing Criminal Trial Through Digital Tools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 August 2016

Mark Finnane  and
Alana Piper
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The Prosecution Project <https://prosecutionproject.griffith.edu.au/> is a large-scale digital project that aims to provide a new way of exploring the context and impact of changes in the criminal trial during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does so from an elementary platform: the digitization of the court calendars of criminal trials in the higher courts in the six main Australian jurisdictions over time periods as long as 130 years. The objective is to address questions of the criminal justice process centered on prosecution, from arrest, committal, and indictment, to verdict, sentence, and beyond. In a field of historical research that is more often characterized by the richness of discursive analysis, the Prosecution Project's comparative data sets are designed to offer a new understanding of quantitative context over long periods of time. The challenge of building the data platform is, however, considerable, requiring significant planning, collaboration and investment by a large number of researchers, working with relevant archive repositories, and, in this case, assisted by the engagement of an interested community lying outside the regular academy. This article describes the background to the project, its development as a collaborative digital initiative, and its technical and organizational requirements and possibilities, before we explore briefly some of the research outcomes that this project makes possible.

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Law and History Review , Volume 34 , Special Issue 4: Digital Law and History , November 2016 , pp. 873 - 891
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2016 

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References

1. David Neal, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995); Alex Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law Book Co., 1982); and Lisa Ford, “The Pig and the Peace,” in Law and Politics in British Colonial Thought: Transpositions of Empire (Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History), ed. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Ian Hunter. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

2. The cases recovered and edited in a number of projects are most extensive for New South Wales, Tasmania and New Zealand. All online cases now available are best accessed at the AUSTLII Australasian Colonial Legal History Library. http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/special/colonialhistory/ (accessed August 9, 2016).

3. For example, studies in historical jurisprudence on the one hand, and social history on the other: Arlie Loughnan, Manifest Madness: Mental Incapacity in Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Sara Klingenstein, Tim Hitchcock, and Simon DeDeo, “The Civilizing Process in London's Old Bailey,” Proceeding of the National Academy of Science, 2014. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1405984111 (accessed August 9, 2016).

4. See Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Kris Inwood, and Jim Stankovich, “Prison and the Colonial Family,” The History of the Family, April 7, 2015, 1–18; and Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, Cracknell, Matthew, and Inwood, Kris, “Height, Crime and Colonial History,” America 55 (2012): 416Google Scholar.

5. To take a single example, the prevalence of plea bargaining in American trial contexts, a tradition that does not fit readily into the history of the criminal trial in Australia, see Michael McConville and Chester L Mirsky, Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining: A True History (Oxford; Portland, OR: Hart Pub., 2005).

6. Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney & Cape Town, 1820–1850 (Melbourne University Press, 2004); Hamar Foster, A. R. Buck, and Benjamin L. Berger, eds. The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).

7. The paucity of research on twentieth-century crime is pointed out in Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in Twentieth-Century England (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2011).

8. See Finnane, Mark and Garton, Stephen, “The Work of Policing: Social Relations and the Criminal Justice System in Queensland 1880–1914 Part 2,” Labour History 63 (1992): 43–64 Google Scholar; and Finnane, Mark and Moore, Clive, “Kanaka Slaves or Willing Workers? Melanesians and the Criminal Justice System in Queensland in the 1890s,” Criminal Justice History: An International Annual xiii (1992): 141–60Google Scholar, articles that drew on digitiszed  data from police watchhouse books.

9. National Library of Australia's Trove database of digitized newspapers http://trove.nla.gov.au/ (accessed August 9, 2016).

10. J. McI. Young, “Hood, Sir Joseph Henry (1846–1922),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University (published first in print in 1983). http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hood-sir-joseph-henry-6725/text11615 (January 18, 2016).

11. Rankin, Anne, “The Effect of Pretrial Detention,” New York University Law Review 39 (1964): 641–55Google Scholar; Fontaine, Gary and Kiger, Rick, “The Effects of Defendant Dress and Supervision on Judgments of Simulated Jurors: An Exploratory Study,” Law and Human Behaviour 2 (1978): 63–71 Google Scholar; and Sacks, Meghan and Ackerman, Alissa R., “Pretrial Detention and Guilty Pleas: If They Cannot Afford Bail They Must Be Guilty,” Criminal Justice Studies 25 (2012): 265–78Google Scholar.

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13. Frank M. Weerman, “Theories of Co-offending,” in Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, ed. Gerben Bruinsma and David Weisburd (New York: Springer, 2014), 5173–84.

14. Courier-Mail (Brisbane), August 5, 1939, 1 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article40832065 (accessed August 9, 2016).

15. For a discussion of the evolution and development criminal statistics collection practices, see Barry S. Godfrey, Chris A. Williams, and Paul Wilson, History & Crime (London: Sage Publications, 2008), ch. 3.

16. Howard, Sharon, “Bloody Code: Reflecting on a Decade of the Old Bailey Online and The Digital Futures of Our Criminal Past,” Law, Crime and History 1 (2015): 13Google Scholar.

17. John Hostettler, Criminal Jury Old and New: Jury Power from Early Times to the Present Day (Winchester: Waterside Press, 2004), 121.

18. Vogel, Mary E., “The Social Origins of Plea Bargaining: Conflict and the Law in the Process of State Formation, 1830–1860,” Law & Society Review 33 (1999): 161–246 Google Scholar. McConville and Mirsky, Jury Trials and Plea Bargaining. The topic is the object of study by Lisa Durnian, a doctoral researcher on the Prosecution Project.

19. Godfrey, Barry, “Counting and Accounting for the Decline in Non-Lethal Violence in England, Australia, and New Zealand, 1880–1920,” British Journal of Criminology 43 (2003): 340–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20. Hill, R. W. Langevin, R., Paitich, D., Handy, L., Russon, A., & Wilkinson, L. “Is Arson an Aggressive Act or a Property Offence? A Controlled Study of Psychiatric Referrals,” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 27, 8 (1982): 648–5454 Google Scholar.

21. Francis, Brian, Soothill, Keith, and Dittrich, Regina, “A New Approach for Ranking ‘Serious’ Offences: The Use of Paired-Comparisons Methodology,” The British Journal of Criminology 41 (2002): 726–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. David Lemmings, Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).