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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
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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