In her essay, “Getting Away with Murder,” Elizabeth Dale explores Eric Monkkonen’s suggestion that the legal system in American has historically been tolerant of homicide to an extent. More specifically, she decides to look at the verdict and sentencing of several homicide cases in antebellum South Carolina. She concludes that the level of legal toleration for murder was affected by the killer’s class and gender, and she suggests that further research should be made into extralegal punishments that the community may have imposed.
Unlike Monkkonen who often compared the homicide rates of different units of space (and time) throughout his essay, “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” (for example, comparing Western Europe as a whole against individual American states or cities across different time periods), Dale narrows the scope of her analysis to antebellum South Carolina. She chose to “focus on [antebellum]…show more content… To refute Laura Edwards’s suggestion that “white women were punished more harshly than white men,” Dale cites Jack Kenny Williams, who “concluded that white women charged with crimes were convicted at the same (low) rate as white men and given roughly the same sorts of punishment” (Dale 101). Because the cases Dale discusses before this point in her essay appear to support what Edwards claims, Dale proceeds to give her own examples of cases demonstrating inconsistency regarding how harshly women were punished, thus showing that gender alone seemed to have little effect on the results of cases. Dale concludes, “Poorer white women were subject to the censure of both judges and jurors, while wealthy women were more likely to be exempted from prosecution, or to be acquitted if tried,” which is consistent with her argument that class played a role in homicide cases (Dale
