Defending the Accused: The Impact of Legal Representation on Criminal Trial Outcomes in Victoria, Australia 1861–1961

Abstract

Access to legal representation by accused felons was entrenched as part of the adversarial system from the early nineteenth century, but a substantial minority of defendants remained undefended at superior court level well into the twentieth century. Using a sample of criminal trials collected across a crucial hundred-year period that saw the development of incipient legal assistance schemes, this article seeks to examine what effect the presence of defence counsel had on individual trial results. It is shown that there was a significant association between defence status and a variety of outcomes, including pleas, verdicts, trial length, bail status and sentencing. This relationship was to some extent affected by the specific offence with which the accused was charged, but remains evident across various other factors, including defendant ethnicity, sex, occupation and age, and lawyer assigned to the case. The results suggest that representation was highly desirable for defendants throughout this period.

Gender, intimate partner homicide, and rurality in early-twentieth-century New South Wales

“…The analysis of rural versus urban crime in Australia has relied on state capitals to stand for "urban" settlements (Nagy 2021;Nagy and Piper 2019;Piper and Finnane 2017a). Ironically, this approach highlights urbanity, since it describes the balance of the state (in NSW, over 300,000 square miles) as "rural" territory.…”

“…Caroline Buckman and her children, unsupported by their father, were so poor that they had survived for months on flour and rabbits; consequently, she could ill afford to hire a solicitor or a barrister to represent her. Australian historical criminological studies have confirmed the deleterious impact of poverty on the quality of legal defenses (Piper and Finnane 2017a;2017b). However, one of the state's top lawyers from an illustrious legal family, Richard Windeyer, volunteered to represent the accused pro bono, and he ensured that the woman was released on bail (possibly guaranteed with his own funds).…”

“…All the women charged with IP murder in NSW in the first half of the twentieth century were too poor to hire their own counsel, and in Eileen Meagher's case, some were also illiterate. This left her particularly reliant on the barrister who responded to the usual court request for a man to represent the indigent, a factor that typically put defendants at a disadvantage (Piper and Finnane 2017b). P.D.…”

Sharing the archive: Using web technologies for accessing, storing and re-using historical data

“…Criminological concerns with understanding changing patterns of crime, policing and punishment are joined with legal historical questions about the changing process of prosecution. Accessing original data enables researchers to explore questions rarely contemplated in historical studies of the criminal justice system, such as the specific roles and impact of defence lawyers (Piper and Finnane, 2017a, 2017b) or the victim characteristics associated with the prosecution of offences against person or property (Finnane and Kaladelfos, 2016; Piper, 2018). In contrast to the focus of official record-keeping on the criminal offender, the data accessed by the Prosecution Project enable us to contemplate a history in which all parties to the process of the trial recover their historical place.…”