Mothers who kill their own children are unusual women whose offences often elicit fear, horror and condemnation in others. Psychiatrists may be asked to assess such women to explore the relationship between the offence and maternal mental illness, and the potential risk to other children. In this chapter, I discuss some available data on mothers who kill, in terms of criminal justice statistics, and review accounts of motives for such killings. I briefly discuss the legal processes that mother who kill must face, and the role of the psychiatrist. I then discuss some recent research about the role of maternal attachment security in relation to attitudes towards children and the transition to motherhood and the potential for psychological disorder that arise during that transition. I also comment on social factors, such as the role of partners and fathers. I conclude with some discussion about the management of cases where mental illness is a risk factor for filicide, and the associated child protection issues that may arise in such cases.

This chapter develops the theoretical explanation of why transitional justice processes and the reckoning of a repressive history can prevent the outbreak of large-scale criminal violence in new democracies. It first discusses a new conception of organized crime where complicit state specialists in violence are central players in illicit economies and in the production of large-scale criminal violence. It suggests that these engagements often emerge in autocracies, where autocrats allow military and police forces to capitalize on their repressive power to kill political dissidents and on their de facto impunity to control the criminal underworld. If left unaccountable, authoritarian specialists in violence can become leading actors in the production of criminal violence in democracy by defecting to fight turf wars or defending organized criminal groups from positions of power or spearheading Wars on Drugs, Gangs, or Crime. It claims that when new democratic elites expose and sanction authoritarian specialists in violence through robust truth commissions and criminal trials, they unleash a powerful accountability shock that breaks state impunity and deters security forces from using state coercive power to control illicit economies through lethal force. Failure to reckon with a repressive history, and the survival of the violent state, sets new democracies on trajectories of power abuse and criminal wars.

This chapter presents the statistical analysis of the main theoretical propositions across countries. It first discusses the sample of seventy-six Third Wave democracies (1974–2005), why the homicide rate is used as the metric of criminal violence, and the different indices created to capture various dimensions of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws. It then explains why we test for the immediate and cumulative impacts of truth commissions, trials, and amnesty laws and their joint effects. Using the global sample and a subsample of seventeen Latin American countries, the results indicate that truth commissions have a strong deterrent effect on the murder rate and criminal prosecution only has an impact when combined with truth commissions. The joint effect of truth and justice represents the accountability shock’s violence-reducing effect. The shock is more powerful in the Latin American subsample. Additional models reveal two crucial points: (1) to have an effect, the accountability shock needs to be robust; and (2) the effect of the accountability shock (absent other measures) expires after about ten years. The positive association between amnesty laws and higher homicide rates reinforces the conclusion that persistent state impunity promotes violence, underscoring the importance of accountability for past atrocities as necessary for future violence reduction.

And finally – the moment you will have been waiting for – in the Epilogue, I reveal the outcome of Heyton’s case, reflecting on what these trials say about medieval English immigration laws, and their legacies today.

The interplay between local and global history is where the trials of empire are held. The Ottoman state overturned the autonomously ruled Kurdish Emirates in the mountainous east, bringing large numbers of Kurdish- and Armenian-speakers directly under Ottoman rule. The efforts to divide and conquer these populations created "Armenian" and "Kurdish" questions that have occupied ruling elites since the mid-nineteenth century. The "Armenian question," like many of the "questions" of the nineteenth century – "the Woman question," "the Negro question," or "the Jewish’ question" – related to the rights of those who had long been denied equality. This "question" intensified in a struggle in the Muş highlands between Armenian peasants and their warlord in the late 1880s. As elsewhere in the mountainous regions of the empire, the Ottomans backed local nobles who expressed loyalty. In the plain of Muş, the Ottoman central authorities continued to support the warlord Musa Bey, despite accusations of malfeasance, kidnapping, and murder. For many of the Armenian peasants, the final straw was in 1889 when Musa Bey kidnapped and raped Gülizar, a young daughter of a priest. Local protests spread through migrant networks to Istanbul, and then through the press to readers around the world.

This chapter outlines the basic principles of qualitative research in the context of mental health. We begin by discussing the philosophy of reality and knowledge production, demonstrating how these discussions filter through to every aspect of qualitative research. We then explain the fundamental elements of qualitative research, including how to formulate a research question, different methodological approaches, the application of qualitative methods in clinical trials, data collection, sampling, and analysis. This chapter also focuses on how qualitative research can make a change, providing unique insights on how to influence policy and engage government. We devote a substantial part of the chapter to research ethics and reflexivity, summarising not only basic bioethical principles, but thinking about ethics from an anti-colonial perspective. We end the chapter by exploring what constitutes high quality qualitative research, laying out some guiding principles and practices for promoting quality. Our aim with this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account of qualitative research, rather to offer guidance and inspiration to fledgling researchers who would like to find out more.

This chapter examines courtroom documents, focusing on trials and depositions, which offer glimpses of spoken language of the past. Trials written in English, often in the form of questions and answers, are rare before the late sixteenth century. Depositions, the oral testimony of a witness recorded by a scribe prior to trial and used as evidence, become more available in English from the mid sixteenth century. Trials and depositions exist as manuscripts, contemporaneous printed texts and later printed editions, and have recently become accessible through corpora and modern linguistic editions. Manuscripts (already one step beyond the original speech event) are less susceptible to interference by editors, printers and so on, but even these texts should not be treated as verbatim records. Nevertheless, the texts supply valuable data for researchers taking historical pragmatic and sociolinguistic approaches and/or examining linguistic variation and change, and in a wide range of other areas.

The documentation related to inquisitorial practice included trial transcripts, consultations, sentences, manuals and accounts. But while this documentation was a key ingredient in inquisition’s power, the relationship between these sources and our knowledge of medieval heresy is complex.

Whenever the story of lollardy has been told, that story has been shaped by the prevailing historical, theological and intellectual climate. This chapter surveys how lollardy has been narrated, looking at the terminology, people and communities, practices and texts, and beliefs associated with the lollard or Wycliffite movement of late medieval England.

This chapter introduces the extraordinary range of archival materials and archives used by Holocaust scholars. It chronicles the efforts of prewar organizations to preserve Jewish papers and artifacts, and the clandestine efforts in ghettos and even in camps to document the unfolding genocide. This is followed by accounts of postwar retrieval efforts, often delayed for decades, and documentation efforts with multiple legal, historical, memorial, and welfare goals in mind. Some lacked a fixed home and dissolved, others followed their organizers to new homes. A fierce battle developed over German government, military, and industrial records and over postwar civilian search records. Since the 1980s, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum has joined Yad Vashem as a central collection point for Holocaust material. Finally, the chapter turns to what constitutes a valuable artifact and to the impact of digitization on the Holocaust archive.

This chapter examines the Board of Longitude’s relationships with watchmakers in the five decades after their dealings with John Harrison. In this period in which the chronometer – a term brought into more common use in the period – began to develop into a stable technology, the Board still fielded proposals for schemes about mechanical timekeeping and actively engaged with a small number of makers. Acting within the remit of a new Longitude Act in 1774 that significantly changed the terms for testing and reward, the Board increasingly relied on land trials at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, alongside a small number of long-distance voyages, which provided an additional arena for testing the nascent technology. During this period, the Board became embroiled in two debates that further shaped its horological dealings and saw its authority contested in Parliament. The first, over the work of Thomas Mudge, saw the Board’s authority undermined. The second, centring on a long and bitter dispute between watchmakers Thomas Earnshaw and John Arnold (and son), finally saw the Board’s authority recognised.

Focusing on the period from the early 1760s to the resolution of the John Harrison affair in 1773, this chapter argues that it was only in this period that the ‘Board of Longitude’ came into being. This was largely in response to the debates surrounding the sea trials of Harrison’s fourth marine timekeeper (H4) and two other longitude schemes – Tobias Mayer’s tables and method for lunar distances and Christopher Irwin’s marine chair for observing Jupiter’s satellites. The transformation into a standing board manifested in regular rather than sporadic meetings and the appointment of a secretary to keep the Board’s papers in order as the Commissioners, for whom astronomer Nevil Maskelyne would become a central figure, sought to defend their decisions over the allocation of monetary rewards. The debates with Harrison, which focused on questions of adequate testing and the judging of trials, disclosure and replicability, and accusations of self-interest, would see the Board harden its stance through the use of legislation to ensure resolution. The Harrisons and their supporters, by contrast, sought to bolster support through lobbying and publication of their claims.

This chapter examines laws governing witnesses at trial and their testimony as well as other rules related to legal procedure. It also looks at how these topics figure in a number of psalms and in prophetic literature, since the relationship of individuals and even entire nations to Yahweh is often depicted in legal terms.

The use of expert psychological testimony by the courts involves a series of decisions. The initial decision involves an attorney or judge seeking out an expert to provide testimony. The second set of decisions – usually made by the expert in consultation with the attorney – concerns whether the potential testimony will be helpful or harmful to the case. A third set of decisions – made by the judge in a specific case – concerns the admissibility and scope of expert testimony at trial. If the testimony is admitted at trial, a final decision involves how much or how little weight jurors give the expert testimony while arriving at a verdict. These decisions are strongly shaped by the adversarial system. Drawing on empirical research and their experiences as expert witnesses, the authors explore how these decisions are made. Relevant research is reviewed, particularly on the content and impact of expert psychological testimony. New directions for research are discussed.