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In this article, we take a novel approach to analysing English sentencing
remarks in cases of women who kill. We apply computational, quantitative, and
qualitative methods from corpus linguistics to analyse recurrent patterns in a collection
of English Crown Court sentencing remarks from 2012 to 2015, where a
female defendant was convicted of a homicide offence. We detail the ways in which
women who kill are referred to by judges in the sentencing remarks, providing
frequency information on pronominal, nominative, and categorising naming
strategies. In discussion of the various patterns of preference both across and within
these categories (e.g. pronoun vs. nomination, title ? surname vs. forename
? surname), we remark upon the identities constructed through the references
provided. In so doing, we: (1) quantify the extent to which members of the judiciary
invoke patriarchal values and gender stereotypes within their sentencing remarks to
construct female defendants, and (2) identify particular identities and narratives that
emerge within sentencing remarks for women who kill. We find that judges refer to
women who kill in a number of ways that systematically create dichotomous narratives
of degraded victims or dehumanised monsters. We also identify marked
absences in naming strategies, notably: physical identification normally associated
with narrativization of women’s experiences; and the first person pronoun, reflecting
omissions of women’s own voices and narratives of their lived experiences in the
courtroom.