6/7/04

6/7/04 Latest in Technology Brings Chicago Homicides and History to Life

A hand-written data set of 11,000 Chicago homicides, carefully kept by Chicago police from 1870 to 1930 and meticulously preserved on microfiche by the Illinois State Archives, was dusted off by a Northwestern University School of Law researcher, converted into a Microsoft file, coded for quantitative analysis and made the focus of an academic conference and a volume of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Now thanks to the latest in technology, a new Web site that was launched today will make the coded and richly contextualized database available to all. Bringing the tumultuous time period alive, the Web site also includes archival photos, historic news articles and crime reports as well as the law journal volume and related video clips featuring contemporary perspectives on the city’s flamboyant history.

“The Chicago police methodically wrote down each homicide for 60 years straight, reflecting all the biases and rhetorical flourishes of that volatile time period, over six decades of war, peace, prosperity and financial panic,” said Leigh B. Bienen, senior lecturer in the School of Law at Northwestern, criminal defense attorney and director of the Chicago Historical Homicide Project.

“Just as those policemen could not possibly have envisioned how their data set would be the focus of so much attention today, we can’t possibly imagine the insights that will emerge from our Web site by making these records accessible to a world wide audience.”

The Web site is designed to provide the ultimate in ease for both updating and accessing visual and narrative content. Its creation is a cross-disciplinary project that reached across the University for talent and was a collaboration between Northwestern’s School of Communication, led by Assistant Dean Dennis Glenn and Webmaster Mark Swindle, and the School of Law. Undergraduate and graduate students who were involved are from law, communication, the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Judd A. and Marjorie Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The cross-disciplinary project has received funding and support from the School of Law research funds, the Joyce Foundation, the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Photographs and documents from the Chicago Historical Society’s Daily News Collection, the Northwestern University Library Archives, the American Newspaper Repository and other sources provide the rich visual background.

The database of homicides may be utilized in numerous ways -- as autonomous case narratives, as data points on individual victims and defendants, to identify subsets of homicides by type of crime, or as occurring in particular periods or parts of the city. Beyond that, the contextual material will delight as well as haunt just about anybody interested in Chicago’s history with its vivid depictions of the vast legal, economic, demographic, political and social changes occurring over the 60-year period of these records.

The Web site takes you to the Harrison Street police station, noted in the first homicide in the data set and the place where many of the defendants were taken to be arrested. For a period of time, the police station also served as a homeless shelter, and that scene is vividly described in contemporaneous commentary.

Click on People v. Fisher, one of the most sensational crimes of the century, and listen to a video clip by Thomas Geraghty, an associate dean for clinical education at the School of Law who offers the gist of his in-depth article about the 1929 case in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Geraghty, also the director of the Bluhm Legal Clinic at the School of Law and a leading defense attorney who specializes in juvenile, criminal and death penalty cases, has spent much of his career arguing in court. He looked at the Fisher case in the context of criminal law practice in the courts of Cook County in 1929.

The case, a bank robbery/murder in which a security guard was killed, received a great deal of attention in Chicago newspapers, yet has been ignored by scholars. All of the defendants -- three were sentenced to death and three to life in prison -- as well as the victim were black.

Both the prosecution and defense attorneys displayed skill and dedication, particularly the defense lawyers who fought with remarkable zeal to save their clients’ lives in the face of overwhelming odds, Geraghty said.

“I don’t think there is any doubt that the defendants were severely beaten by the police,” he commented on the video clip.

After the defendants made their confessions, oddly, in the presence of witnesses to the crime, they were taken back to the bank and forced to perform a bizarre reenactment of the crime, which made front-page news. The executions were carried out in a gallery, with a public viewing section, in the basement of the existing Cook County criminal court building at 26th and California.

“The people who witnessed [the executions] were quite shocked and horrified by what they saw,” Geraghty said.

“The data set began shortly after the Chicago Fire and continued until the Depression period of 1930 when the police changed their methods of recording homicides for reasons we don’t know,” Bienen said.

A click on “Crimes of the Century” also highlights a number of other high-profile cases, such as Leopold and Loeb (1924), the cold-blooded murder of a 14-year-old boy by two young men from wealthy and socially established families who simply wanted to commit the perfect, motiveless crime; the Haymarket affair (1886), the historic meeting that culminated in the killing of seven police officers and set off a torrent of sentiment against seven prominent labor organizers and anarchists who were found guilty of being accessories to the murders; and the case of the accidental anarchist (1908), the killing of Lazarus Averbuch by Chief of Police George Shippy, who, at the time, wrongly insisted that Averbuch was an anarchist whom he killed in self-defense.

An eerie photo shows Averbuch’s dead body sitting in a chair, his head held up by the chief of police’s son, while spectators stare. Another photo offers a portrait of Lucy E. Parsons, an African American woman who was arrested for rioting during an unemployment protest at Hull House. She was the widow of Albert Parsons, one of the defendants hanged for complicity in the Haymarket affair.

“Everyone who starts looking at these materials comments about how the richness of the historical context greatly influences their current work,” Bienen said. “Although the world of these crimes is distant from our own, so many similar patterns and behaviors emerge.”

Other high-profile crimes on the Web site involve Mayor Carter Harrison (1893), who was assassinated after giving the closing address at the World Columbian Exposition, and the summer race riot (1919), which left 38 dead, including 23 black men and boys, and 537 injured, of whom 342 were black, and hundreds homeless.

Click on “murder/suicides” on the home page and hear a video clip by Michelle Oberman, a professor at DePaul University College of Law, describing her research for an article she wrote about mothers who kill their children in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. She has been following such contemporary cases for more than a decade.

Oberman started her search of the data set very aware of today’s tendency to simply point to mental illness or evil as answers to why mothers kill their children, often calling for parental prosecution. This bypasses the heart of the problem, the isolation of these mothers.

“There are things that are wrong or desperately missing in their lives and their childhoods as they come to motherhood and then to their lives as mothers,” Oberman said in the video clip. She focused on the 1911 case of Mary Stastch, an immigrant from Australia who was arrested after her three-week-old baby was found dead behind a residence. After the 21-year-old, single mother left Cook County Hospital, she wandered about Chicago for two days -- with the baby in her arms -- seeking work. On the third day, Stastch claimed, the baby dropped from her arms and inadvertently was strangled when Stastch grabbed the infant’s bonnet string. She said she then felt too weak to immediately pick up the child.

“The first thing that struck me when I looked at the database -- and it really blows my mind -- was that over 70 percent of the cases in the data set [of mothers killing their children] involve neonaticide,” Oberman said.

Oberman concluded in her article that historically as well as today infanticide may be seen as a response to the societal construction of and restraints on mothering.

“The data set points to the strong connection between government corruption, elections, ward politics and the sale of liquor,” Bienen said. “That includes, according to one of the law journal articles, the relationship between the timing of judicial elections and a judge’s likelihood of imposing the death sentence.”

A quick scanning of the Web site will give you a provocative peek at mob hits, the Levee district in the center of Chicago, where prostitution and gambling houses operated without interference, as well as at the city’s bleak working conditions, particularly for children and those who worked in sweatshops, especially during periods of economic depression and during bitterly cold winters, such as that of 1893.

“At the same time, the records show a proliferation of reform efforts and enormous changes in the development of the police force as a bureaucratic institution,” Bienen said.

Three important governmental reports on crime and vice during this period offer a wealth of social and criminological data that in many ways remain exemplary models for research, Bienen said in “Learning from the Past,” an article by her and Brandon Rottinghaus in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

Although the world of 1870 to 1930 was strikingly different from our own world, many of the homicide patterns exhibited in the data set are familiar: homicides related to what we now term domestic violence, killings by police and of police officers, by the drunk and by the insane, seemingly senseless slayings in bars and saloons, and impulse murders over trivial amounts of money or spontaneous insults.

“Overwhelmingly men kill men and sometimes women,” Bienen said. “Women kill children and sometimes men. And, as the century advances, everyone is killed by recklessly driven automobiles.”

Bienen’s areas of expertise include capital punishment, sex crimes and rape reform legislation. Recent publications also include her book “Crimes of the Century,” with Gilbert Geis (Northeastern University Press, 1998) and her article “The Quality of Justice in Capital Cases: Illinois as a Case Study,” (Law and Contemporary Problems, Duke University School of Law, 1998).

The Web site was created with a content management system that has the capability for easy uploading of new documents and for the continual updating of the site, eliminating the need to send files back and forth. The collaboration between the School of Law and the School of Communication was a natural outgrowth of the School of Communication’s Distributed Learning Center’s advanced technological research and development in the area of distance learning.

“This is a new world, and the traditional disciplinary boundaries quickly break down with this type of work,” Bienen said. “To make this Web site work we had to reach across the University to find the most talented people with many different types of expertise and academic experience.”

Thanks to everyone involved in the Chicago Homicide Project, to all the efforts across the University, these records offer anyone with an interest vast opportunities to study the rule of law or its absence in a historical context, or to simply take a peek at Chicago’s fascinating past.