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Sketching Women in Court: The Visual Construction of Co-accused Women in Court Drawings

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Abstract

This paper explores the visual construction and representation of co-accused women offenders in court drawings. It utilises three case studies of female co-defendants who appeared in the England and Wales court system between 2003 and 2013. In doing so this paper falls into three parts. The first part considers the emergence of the sub-discipline, visual criminology and examines what is known about the visual representation of female offenders. The second part presents the findings of an empirical investigation, which involved engaging in a critical, reflexive visual analysis of a selection of court drawings of three female co-offenders. The third part discusses the ways in which the court artists' interpretation, the conventions of court sketching, and motifs of female offenders as secondary actors, drew on existing myths and prejudices by representing the women as listening, remorseless ‘others’.

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Notes

  1. Myra Hindley was convicted with her partner, Ian Brady, of murdering five children between 1963–1965. She was sentenced in 1966 to life imprisonment and she died in prison in 2002.

  2. Mary Ann Cotton was convicted and hanged for poisoning and subsequently murdering up to 21 victims in the late 1800’s.

  3. Both Huhne and Pryce originally stood trial together, as co-defendants, but Huhne pleaded guilty and Pryce not guilty, which meant that Pryce faced full trial alone. The drawings analysed here which feature Huhne therefore depict the first day in court, when both co-defendants were in court together.

  4. The artist did not give permission to reproduce the sketch of Huhne in Quenzler (2012a).

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  1. Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

    Charlotte Barlow

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  1. Charlotte Barlow
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Correspondence to Charlotte Barlow.

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Barlow, C. Sketching Women in Court: The Visual Construction of Co-accused Women in Court Drawings. Fem Leg Stud 24, 169–192 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-016-9310-3

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