The capacity of a human body to spontaneously harm itself was a major concern for medical jurisprudence in the British Raj. Those accused of crimes against the body could and did claim that the harm they were accused of was caused spontaneously by the victim’s body rather than through their criminal actions. These spontaneous capacities were varied and various, ranging from the possibility of ‘spontaneous combustion’ whereby a human being could allegedly self-ignite, to the notoriously common claim of spontaneous splenic rupture often used by Europeans charged with beating their Indian servants to death. Such spontaneous capacities were also frequently specified by race and gender. The marking or unmarking of spontaneous harm along axes of race and gender draws attention to the ways in which claims of innocence remain a form of situated knowledge thickly enmeshed in contextual articulations of plausibility and power. There has been significant scholarly interest in some of these capacities, such as the tendency to splenic rupture, but they have been looked at in isolation and without much attention to medical jurisprudence. In this paper, I want to pursue three inter-related questions. First, what were the types of spontaneous capacities attributed to the body that could absolve an accused of any guilt? Second, can these various types of spontaneous activity allow us to detect a coherent physiology of spontaneity in the textbooks on medical jurisprudence? Finally, I will explore precisely how much of this notion of spontaneity was specific to British India.

In cases of infanticide, forensic medicine has always played an important role, examining the baby’s and the mother’s body. The mother’s mind and her emotional state were to some extent relevant in the nineteenth-century courtroom, but in the twentieth century psychiatry gained more influence in the Netherlands. Forensic psychiatrists applied the notion of ‘puerperal psychosis’ in the first decades and different concepts from psychoanalysis by mid-twentieth century. Several notions of innocence, related to unaccountability and insanity, interact in these cases: whereas forensic medicine searched for clear signs of murder on the body, forensic psychiatry aimed to explain the act of child murder by referring to the mind – especially psychoanalytic explanations revolving around femininity, sexuality and motherhood. Moreover, more general cultural images of gender influenced both psychiatry and the law. In the nineteenth century, young unmarried women were often seen as the innocent victims of a patriarchal system which left them unprotected, even if they were guilty of infanticide. This image of innocent girls can still be traced in the twentieth century, but seems to have been in tension with psychoanalytical views on femininity. This paper will explore these different conceptions of gendered innocence in forensic medicine, psychiatry and (legal) culture, arguing that murdering mothers continued to baffle the law and science in an age of increasing trust in forensic science and its regime of truth, because women and motherhood remained a mystery.

Since the first US case of post-conviction DNA exoneration in 1989, national advocacy organizations, spearheaded by the Innocence Project, have championed the cause of potentially innocent prisoners, raised public awareness, and promoted policy reform. These developments have been hailed as the dawn of a uniquely modern moral, legal and scientific order – an ‘innocence revolution.’ In this presentation I question this claim to historical singularity by exploring a prior forensic framework of innocence centered on Erle Stanley Gardner’s ‘Court of Last Resort.’ Today Gardner is remembered as the creator of Perry Mason, the intrepid attorney who successfully cleared underdogs caught ensnared in false criminal charges. In the late 1940s Gardner sought to replicate Mason’s fictional heroics by establishing his ‘Court’ as an expert board dedicated to investigating cases of wrongful conviction. In many respects, Gardner’s enterprise shares some essential structural features of our present innocence moment. Yet as I will argue Gardner’s project was profoundly influenced by the political, legal, cultural and scientific context of Cold War America, and this determined both the forensic techniques it deployed in the pursuit of innocence, and the criteria for selecting whose claim to innocence was worth pursuing.

No criminal defendant, in principle, has to prove his own innocence. It is enough to sow doubt about the argument that the prosecution is making: in dubio pro reo (when in doubt, for the accused). Yet suspects and their defence attorneys frequently attempt to do just that. In their efforts they may enlist forensic technologies that are thereby presented as what one might term ‘technologies of innocence.’ Of course, these same technologies could also be turned against the defendant and thus become ‘technologies of guilt.’ This paper explores the processes by which new forensic technologies are conceptualized as ‘technologies of guilt’ and ‘technologies of innocence.’ To that end, I look at the introduction of several forensic technologies in the Dutch legal system in the twentieth century, including lie detection (briefly introduced in 1956) and DNA (first used in the Netherlands in 1988). Characterized as an inquisitorial system, which relies on supposedly ‘neutral’ court-appointed experts, the Dutch legal system might be seen as an unlikely site for such an analysis. I contend, however, that, in practice, technologies and expertise are not significantly more neutral in the Dutch inquisitorial system than in adversarial systems.