Virtual Presentation!
In the early modern British Atlantic, jurists, members of the clergy, and ordinary people shaped ideas about criminal culpability. In colonial New England, communities debated whether offenders bore the bulk of responsibility for their misdeeds or if society shared some of the blame based on the covenant established by Mosaic law. In this virtual talk, Arrannè Rispoli, New England Research Fellowship Consortium grantee, will consider how questions surrounding culpability were further complicated when enslaved Africans were the alleged actors in question. Arrannè will analyze how Anglo-Americans wrestled with the contradiction that people held in bondage could be both categorically unfree and willful agents whose conscious actions necessitated their corporal punishment.
Using Connecticut as a case study, Arrannè analyzes how criminal courts in the region both drew inspiration from and contributed to broader trans-Atlantic discourses of mens rea, or the precursor to today’s criminal culpability. He argues that mens rea provided the legal mechanism that enabled the prosecution of enslaved Africans for capital offenses without undermining the logic that undergirded forced servitude, thus allowing colonial actors to justify the institution of slavery as an instrument of control for enslaved populations whom they came to believe were more likely than the general population to commit felonies like murder, rape, and arson.
Arrannè will discuss how this framework colonial courts used to determine criminal culpability helped cultivate a predictive model of criminality that constructed the archetype of Black criminality in the colonial imagination, the antecedent to the racialized depictions of crime so pervasive in today’s media landscape.
This virtual event is free and open to the public. Get tickets to receive the Zoom link.
Questions? Contact Jen Busa, Public Programs Coordinator at jbusa@connecticutmuseum.org.
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About the speaker: Arrannè Rispoli is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UCLA, where he is writing his dissertation titled “The Justice of Malicious Intent: Capital Punishment and The Origins of Black Criminality in Early New England.” His work has been supported by the Omohundro Institute, the Rhode Island Historical Society, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and four institutions as part of the New England Research Fellowship Consortium, including the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History.
Image: 1962 illustration of Hannah Occuish, the youngest person executed in U.S. history and the last woman executed in Connecticut. Joe De Bona for The Hartford Courant, November 1, 1964, p. 231. Via Newspapers.com.
