The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson

On December 8, 1941, Grace Holmes Carlson, the only female defendant among eighteen Trotskyists convicted under the Smith Act, was sentenced to sixteen months in federal prison for advocating the violent overthrow of the government. After serving a year in Alderson prison, Carlson resumed organizing for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and ran for vice president of the United States under its banner in 1948. Then, in 1952, she abruptly left the SWP and returned to the Catholic Church. With the support of the Sisters of St. Joseph, who had educated her as a child, Carlson began a new life as a professor who now advocated for social justice as a Catholic Marxist. The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist is a historical biography that examines Carlson’s story in the context of her times. Her experiences illuminate the workings of class identity within the context of various influences over the course of a lifespan. Her story contributes to recent historical scholarship exploring the importance of faith in workers’ lives and politics. And it uncovers both the possibilities and limitations for working-class and revolutionary Marxist women in the period between the first- and second-wave feminist movements. The long arc of Carlson’s life (1906–1992) reveals continuities in her political consciousness that transcended the shifts in her partisan commitments, most notably her lifelong dedication to challenging the root causes of social inequality. In that struggle Carlson proved herself to be a truly fierce woman.

Examining Mock Jurors' Perceptions of Intimate Partner Violence Factors

The purpose of the current study was to examine whether juror gender, male-to-female or female-to-male abuse, eyewitness age (8, 12, and 16 years old), and type of intimate partner violence witnessed (physical, sexual, and emotional) influenced mock jurors' decision-making. Mock jurors (N = 1,162) read a trial transcript where the child of a married couple witnessed one of the three types of intimate partner violence, perpetrated by the husband against his wife or the wife against her husband, and answered related questions. Mock jurors were asked to render a dichotomous verdict, continuous guilt rating, and rate their perceptions of the victim, defendant, and eyewitness. Male jurors were more likely to find the defendant guilty when the defendant was female and the witness was 16 years old; additionally, female mock jurors assigned higher guilt ratings for the male defendant compared to the female defendant. Mock jurors also assigned higher guilt ratings when the abuse was physical compared to both sexual and emotional; abuse also influenced perceptions of the defendant, victim, and eyewitness. Mock jurors also were more likely to hold positive perceptions of the eyewitness when she was 16 years old compared to 8 years old. The results of the current study suggest that gender of the defendant and victim may combine to influence mock jurors' perceptions of a case involving intimate partner violence; moreover, the type of abuse witnessed by a child also may impact the child's perceived credibility.

A Case of Culture

The purpose of this study was to investigate the use of cultural evidence toward an automatism defense, and whether such evidence would be detrimental or beneficial to a male versus a female defendant. U.S. participants ( N = 208), recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, read a fictional spousal homicide case in which the defendant claimed to have blacked out during the crime. We manipulated the gender of the defendant and whether a culture-specific issue was claimed to have precipitated the defendant’s blackout. ANOVAs revealed that cultural evidence positively affected perceived credibility for the female defendant, whereas there were no differences for the male defendant. Results also demonstrated that when cultural evidence was presented, the female defendant was seen as less in control of her actions than was the male defendant. Furthermore, lower credibility and higher perceived defendant control predicted harsher verdict decisions. This investigation may aid scholars in discussing concerns regarding a clash between multicultural and feminist objectives in the courtroom.

The Effects of Victim Gender, Defendant Gender, and Defendant Age on Juror Decision Making

Mock jurors provided credibility ratings for a victim (12 years old) and defendant when victim gender, defendant gender, and defendant age (15 vs. 40 years old) were manipulated. Verdicts and sentence recommendations also were assessed. Higher guilt ratings were found for a male versus female defendant. Juror gender was examined as a covariate in the analyses. Female jurors rated the victim higher on accuracy, truthfulness, and believability than male jurors. Male jurors rated the defendant higher on reliability, credibility, truthfulness, and believability than female jurors. Male jurors perceived the victim to desire and cause the crime to a greater extent than female jurors. Mock jurors rated the victim as more responsible for the crime with an older versus younger defendant. Female jurors ascribed higher responsibility to the defendant compared to male jurors. The younger versus older defendant was perceived to have desired the event but only when the victim was female versus male.

Speaking of Illness: Nerves, Narratives, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology

In 1862 parliament deliberated the Lunacy Regulation Bill, which stipulated that medical testimony keep to the broad road of “fact” and not stray into the crooked alleyways of speculative “opinion.” During its debates, the House of Lords sometimes sounded like a parliamentary annex of Punch, or of Swift's Academy of Projectors. Decrying how “the very idea of a mad doctor's examination has become a by-word,” the Lord Chancellor (Lord Westbury) and the Earl of Shaftesbury furnished anecdotes pointing to which way forensic madness lies: in the neighborhood of the lunacy expert who pronounced a fashionable lady deranged for sporting a dagger (“Dear me,” she protested, “if I am insane for that reason, nine-tenths of the ladies in Paris are insane too”); the eminent physician who detected incipient madness in a four-year-old whose cranium exceeded the sanity standard by ½″; the learned gentleman who diagnosed “fatuity and mania” in a female defendant because she could not tell “how much £100 a year was a week,” an impromptu sum which also flummoxed its proposer (“Don't be nervous,” coaxed the cross-examining counsel, “how much is it?”). While no one advocated barring the testimony of medical men entirely, many were reluctant to grant too much influence to paid witnesses interested in advertising expertise, and whose professional bonnets, it would appear, buzzed with their own pet-theoretical bees. The legal distinction between sanity and insanity was not to be drawn lightly for in many respects it was a property line, the critical boundary between free agency and economic wardship. The pertinent questions, argued the Economist, were simply two: “Is A B fit to manage his money? Did A B commit a particular act with … a knowledge that it was wrong, or did he not do it?” As Lord Westbury noted, medical opinion could confuse these issues because doctors and lawyers share deceptively similar terms of art — “lunacy,” “imbecility,” “unsoundness” — but apply them differently and according to incompatible evidentiary procedures. Medicine considers insanity as a matter of disease, he asserted; the law, as a matter of “fact.” In its efforts to serve justice by excluding quackery, the House of Lords burnished its own legislative authority by portraying medicine as self-interested and compromised by multiple interpretive perspectives, and by characterizing the law, by contrast, as reliably linked to empirical fact. What from afar might look like a seamless medico-juridical institution is in truth scored with hairline fractures, if not sizable rifts.