Questioning the Expert: Thorsten Sellin and the Challenges of the Death Penalty’s Abolition by Numbers

Carolyn Strange, Australian National University

Suspicion of government-generated statistics and information collection is transmitted as never before through social media. However, distrust of data is not new. In the supposed heyday of the expert, pioneering criminologist Thorsten Sellin (1896-1994) was arguably the world’s top expert on the death penalty by the mid-twentieth century. Both the U.K. and Canada enlisted Sellin in the early 1950s to inform major government inquiries into capital punishment, its deterrent capacity, and the prospect of abolishing the death penalty. Although he was a known abolitionist (and an active member from 1948 of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment), he testified before the U.K. Royal Commission and the Canadian Parliamentary Committee in a concertedly cool and detached manner. As he explicated his findings, he carefully made allowances for the limitations of his data collected from countries and jurisdictions that had abolished the death penalty and those that had not. Without the emotive discursive framing of human rights, however, Sellin’s data fell flat, easily assailed by the belief in capital punishment’s power to deter and its unique denunciatory capacity. In the recent climate of reinstatement sentiment in countries that have abolished the death penalty, Sellin’s encounter with sceptical retentionists is as relevant today as it was in the 1950s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 161. Truth, Self-Construction and Data in the Legal Archives