2013/08/13 by K. Biber, Katherine Biber
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Law in Society and Culture #Digital and Traditional Archives Management
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/bjc/azt049
This article examines the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. During the criminal trial, evidence is adduced by the prosecution in order to narrate and prove the facts supporting the charges. Strict rules govern the collection, admission and interpretation of evidence at trial, and where evidence has been improperly obtained, or where it may be irrelevant or unreliable, or if is misleading, confusing or unfair, the evidence may be excluded. However, after the conclusion of the trial, this material returns to a notional 'archive' and sometimes continues to proliferate culturally, but subject to no rules nor standards. This article examines some instances in which criminal evidence has been accessed and used post-trial, and asks whether these cultural practices constitute risk or opportunity, or something more benign. Crime's archive has aroused the interest of artists, publishers, scholars, curators and journalists who have accessed it by various methods, and used it for a wide range of purposes, some of which might be transgressive, dangerous or insensitive. This article explores what is at stake in accessing crime's archive and prolonging the cultural afterlife of criminal evidence. It responds, in part, to Eamonn Carrabine's call for a 'critically engaged visual criminology' (2012: 487). For Carrabine, criminology's 'cultural turn' has made scholars more attentive to the transformation of 'traumatic experiences into visual art'