Executing the unrepresented
Legal aid, trial procedure and capital punishment in colonial India
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8961928 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alastair Mcclure (0000-0002-8961-8805, The University of Hong Kong, SAR, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 493-519 |
| Publication date | 2024-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Indian Economic & Social History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-4646 • E-ISSN: 0973-0893 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00194646241285362 |
| OpenAlex | W4404828851 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
The history of the adversarial criminal trial and legal aid has received significant attention in the context of North America and Europe. This article shifts focus to South Asia, to examine the early debates that developed around access to legal representation under colonial rule, with particular attention paid to capital trials. As the article demonstrates, demands for greater state assistance for poor defendants were made in response to a range of connected factors. These included the very large number of colonial subjects being sentenced to death in India, the passing of the Poor Prisoners’ Defence Act of 1903 in England, and the growing attention paid to wrong verdicts and criminal injustice by Indian newspapers, legal commentators and nationalist politicians. In tracking this history across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I suggest that the reluctance of the colonial state to invest in legal aid schemes, alongside the wider culture of under-investment in the bureaucracy of colonial justice, were important contributing factors that help explain both the scale and application of state violence under colonial rule
Ancient history · Business · Capital (architecture · Capital punishment · Colonialism · Criminology · Political science · Punishment (psychology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
Trials of Sovereignty
Document Raj
Transnational Torture
Ironies of Colonial Governance
Engines of Truth
Witnessing Violence, Witnessing as Violence
The Hounds of Empire
Judges v. Jurors
Scales of Justice
Narratives of “Sodomy” and “Unnatural Offenses” in the Courts of Mandate Palestine (1918–48)
The “Rare Infliction”
Defending the Accused
The Indian Middle Classes
Colonial Terror
Everyday Crime, Native Mendacity and the Cultural Psychology of Justice in Colonial India
A Bureaucracy of Rejection
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |