When the ‘corpus juris’ meets a corpus delicti: The appearance

The jury did decide that, if they were insane, their state of mind at the time of the murder did not fit the quite narrow requirements of the M’Naghten Rules.[109]
This cuts to the heart of the matter, given the fact that in this trial the Rules and the Crimes Act 1908 were clearly not given the liberal construal which was possible after Porter and Stapleton and, in particular, given the expansive spirit of s 5(j) of the Acts Interpretation Act 1924. This seems an example of the hegemony of Gothicized law in action, and if not of direct prosecutorial misconduct then of a worriesome compound of judicial hubris/ignorance/fallibility/misfeasance. In either event, it constituted a clear failure to transcend the moral excitability of the times and to have striven to appraise this dreadful outbreak of juvenile violence in a calm and rational spirit based on a full respect for stare decisis doctrine, even if the price of adhesion to that praxis can lock judges out of the wide ambit of discretion which they would prefer to deploy. That said, in fairness to Adams J, the defence line of Medlicott did nothing useful to rebut the sexual paranoia about putative same-sex unions which was rampant at this time in the common-law world (and certainly in New Zealand). As I have already implied, a critical weakness in Medlicott’s diagnosis (from our post-modern perspective) was his bald assertion that “homosexuality and paranoia are very frequently related” (which was certainly the perception among the body politic but probably not a helpful clinical diagnosis of Hulme and Parker, serving only to alienate them further from the already quite remote prospect of public sympathy ) – a thesis which Glamuzina and Laurie claim was “explicitly dismissed” by the prosecution medical witnesses. [110] However Medlicott’s analysis of their “exalted paranoia”[111] and his judgement that in June 1954 both girls “were grossly insane” [112] seems broadly sound. Yet we cannot escape the full force of Leslie Moran’s conception of “the almost complete homosexualisation/pathologisation of justice” in such cases, based on the legal “code of homosexuality as pathology”[113] to which Medlicott certainly adhered and which – doubtless innocently and unwiittingly – fed another tendency identified by Moran: “the ethical impoverishment of law’s violence”[114] as a retributive code. An instance of this oppressive discourse from the period was to be found in the U.S. Navy’s revised indoctrination lectures for women which declared (1953) that “deterioration and destruction of character and integrity are the end results of homosexuality. Even such gross crimes as robbery, suicide, and murder grow out of homosexuality.”[115] And in May 1954 a future New Zealand Prime Minister, David Lange, was to experience, as an eleven-year-old boy, the trauma of a false allegation of indecent assault during a gynaecological examination being visited on his doctor father (Roy Lange). Dr Lange was held in custody for two days and tried by jury and acquitted, but the case testifies to the high-strung tenor of the times (in David Lange’s words, “It took place in a day and age when things were very much different from what they are now” [115a]).
An additional weakness of the Medlicott approach was a crude reference to the youngest Parker child being Mongoloid (whom Medlicott labelled a “Mongolian [sic] imbecile”! ), and to a ‘blue-baby’ which did not live long, as a background which “raises a query as to the stock from which [Pauline] came.”[116] And even before this rampantly insensitive special pleading was delivered, Terence Gresson had begun the defence case alleging that the girls’ “homosexuality was a symptom of their disease of the mind.” [117] Gresson (representing Juliet Hulme) made this statement before he called Medlicott (whom he had commissioned to analyze Juliet) to give evidence, and this strained argument was further emphasized by Dr Bennett when he baldly parroted Medlicott’s line, stating that Juliet and Pauline were “homosexual paranoiacs of the exalted type” (emphasis mine.), turning them into what Robin Wood has labelled as ‘Murderous Gays’.[118] It was little wonder, then, that Dr M. Bevan-Brown (a prominent Christchurch psychiatrist) later recorded his dismay at the manner in which the accused were objectified by their defence counsel – that they “who were the central figures seemed to be treated as robots or dummies” in the process.[119] Glamuzina and Laurie have referred to “the sickness model of homosexuality”(which they emphasize was rejected by the prosecution medical witnesses [120]) and contend that this approach of ‘monsterization’/’eccentricification’ ( an expression of brutal Freudian moralism) “dismisses any real possibility of placing the case within a context of family and circumstance”[121], such as in Bevan-Brown’s verdict that “inadequate nurture” was the primary cause of the tragedy (‘Adolescent Murder’[1955] in his book Mental Health and Personality [Christchurch: Dunford, 1961]). In this perspective this ‘family murder’ was sourced in the dynamics of two interlocked families living under the strain of conflicted relationships and each with their respective secrets. Glamuzina and Laurie insist that “the killing was a consequence of long-standing domestic conflicts and complex circumstances within both families and that these originated largely in the prescriptions of the times.” [122] These commentators suggest that the Hulme-Parker case “created a public association of lesbianism and murder” in New Zealand and express shock that Medlicottian “associations of lesbianism with murder and insanity seemed to have been accepted unquestioningly” by the Hulmes and Parkers themselves.[123] Glamuzina and Laurie point out that the family murder paradigm is, contra Medlicott, the one critical feature which distinguishes Hulme-Parker from Leopold-Loeb:
In fact, there were significant differences between the two cases. First, Leopold and Loeb came from similar social, economic and cultural backgrounds and had known each other since they were young children. They were both Jewish, and their victim was chosen at random from a group of Jewish children. There was no immediate or overt threat to the continuation of their relationship at the time they decided to kill someone. Juliet and Pauline were from different social and economic backgrounds and their victim was a close family member, killed for specific reasons. [124]