Read e-book online Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California (Wilbur PDF

History 1

By Clare V. Mckanna

ISBN-10: 0874175151

ISBN-13: 9780874175158

ISBN-10: 0874175534

ISBN-13: 9780874175530

Excessive homicide charges have consistently been thought of a sign of a society in turmoil, and nineteenth-century California was once no exception. There, a quickly transforming into inhabitants, booming mining camps, inadequate or nonexistent law-enforcement body of workers, and various assorted ethnic teams with differing attitudes towards the legislation and private honor created a state of affairs the place violence was once universal and felony responses different widely. Clare V. McKanna Jr. has released largely at the heritage of felony justice within the West. For Race and murder in Nineteenth-Century California, he studied coroners' inquest experiences, courtroom case records, criminal registers, and different basic resources, in addition to a number of published assets, to research styles of murder and the vagaries of the state's embryonic justice approach. the character of crimes, he came across, diverse with the ethnicity of perpetrators and sufferers, as did trials and sentencing styles. Marginalized participants, just like the state's diminishing Indians, fared worst, and Hispanics, whose conventional felony approach differed in vital methods from the imported practices of the recent white majority, did little larger. murder within the chinese language group was once mostly restricted to fellow chinese language and used to be frequently caused via rivalries between quite a few mystery societies. Whites, coming from a few backgrounds, carried their very own conceptions of honor and their very own predilections towards violence. McKanna provides right here a bright, conscientiously specified portrait of a society in flux, the place old Spanish and chinese language criminal practices collided with English universal legislations and the "Code of the West," the place greed, poverty, and down-right meanness created tensions that regularly resulted in bloodshed. The textual content, more desirable with testimony from modern assets and illustrated with quite a few interval images, is a fascinating and richly clever research of a frontier society the place the legislations was once neither omnipresent nor, often, neutral. This e-book is vital interpreting for someone attracted to the heritage of the West and of the evolution of yank legislation.

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Additional info for Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California (Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities)

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For example, two clubs were found at the scene, one a greasewood club about three feet in length and the other a long piece of two-by-four. If Gabriel had committed the crime, would he have carried two clubs? That seems unlikely. If he had only one, how and where did he locate the other one in the dark? The closest loose wood was near the barn, sixty feet away. Which victim was killed first? If Gabriel was the lone assailant, why did the bodies end up so close together? Would it have been possible for him to kill both at the same time?

F. Chapin, his nearest neighbor, lived about two miles distant, and there was no road servicing the Overend farm. One evening, probably May 14, 1874, two or possibly more assailants allegedly accosted John Overend and beat him to death with a large piece of timber, did the same to his wife, and then using an ax and clubs they killed four children aged four months to seven years. The inquest jury included Dr. E. D. ”41 After holding an inquest, the coroner’s jury quickly buried the bloated and badly decomposed bodies.

78 Rawson’s request for a new trial was denied. 79 The next day the sheriff left on the morning train for San Quentin Prison with José Gabriel in custody. 80 Whether José Gabriel actually killed John and Wilhelmina Geyser remains a mystery. Today modern forensic sciences can solve many cases that would have gone unsolved a century ago. Investigators can tell by the angle and the damage inflicted by the blow what the assailant’s approximate height and weight are and whether he is left- or right-handed.

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Race And Homicide In Nineteenth-Century California (Wilbur S. Shepperson Series in History and Humanities) by Clare V. Mckanna


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