Doing law, psychiatric expertise and “crimes of passion” in the Netherlands and Russia in the twentieth century

Abstract

This chapter compares how ‘crimes of passion’ were defined in law and prosecuted in practice in Russia and the Netherlands in the twentieth century. Taking the approach of ‘doing law’, which entails looking at justice as a process of negotiation involving many participants, the chapter aims to show that what a ‘crime of passion’ is, is not self-evident: it is continually debated and negotiated by multiple actors, such as the legislature, the judiciary and psychiatrists. Both in Russia and the Netherlands the image of ‘crimes of passion’ revolved around ‘othering’: these crimes were seen as typical of other countries or classes, thus confirming a certain self-image. The Soviet socialist discourse framed ‘capitalist’ jealousy – connected to private property and possessiveness – as its opposite. In the Netherlands, the ‘moderate’, ‘rational’ and ‘emancipated’ Dutch contrasted themselves with the passionate French and Italians who were more lenient towards perpetrators trying to uphold their honour. Comparing Russian and Dutch forensic cultures can inform us on the discrepancy between cultural-political images of a certain crime and forensic and legal practice. In the Netherlands, despite the claim that this country was not familiar with the crime of passion, in practice lawyers, prosecutors and psychiatrists regarded the pathology underlying this criminal behaviour as a serious diagnosis, potentially serving to mitigate the sentence of the (often male) perpetrator. In Russia, legal practice not only connected jealousy killings to ‘capitalist’ greed, but also to the offender’s illiteracy, lack of poor education or mental abnormalities.