Arbitrary Justice?: A Comparative Analysis of Canadian Death Sentence Passed and Commuted during the First World War

The topic of military executions has dominated the study of discipline and punishment during the First World War. Considering the relatively small number of men who were executed, 361 in British and Dominion forces combined, it is startling how much attention the subject has garnered. The morality of the practice has been widely discussed and debated and it has spawned recent pardons campaigns in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada. Yet, virtually ignored in these debates have been the stories of the 3,080 men of the British and Dominion forces who were also sentenced to death, but saw their sentences commuted. What was the fate of these men and what accounts for their salvation when the luck of others had run out? The main focus of this article is a comparison between those death sentences confirmed and those commuted. The topic has been solely researched within a Canadian context in which 222 death sentences were passed during the course of the war, and 25 Canadians actually faced with a firing squad. Similar to British statistics as a whole, 89 per cent of all Canadian death sentences were commuted in the First World War. For the purpose of this article, the court-martial and personnel records of 50 Canadian soldiers have been studied. An attempt has been made to find patterns and consistencies to explain why some death sentences were confirmed and others were not. Preliminary findings suggest that the timing of a particular offense, the disciplinary state of an accused soldier’s battalion and the opinions of divisional commanders were the most important influences acting upon the final decision of a military court martial. However, where an individual soldier’s personal disciplinary record was taken into account, the decisions of the courts-martial appear, more often than not, to have been quite random and arbitrary

On the local uniqueness of steady states for the Vlasov-Poisson system

Motivated by recent results of Lemou-M\'ehats-R\"aphael and Lemou concerning the quatitative stability of some suitable steady states for the Vlasov-Poisson system, we investigate the local uniqueness of steady states near these one. This research is inspired by analogous results of Couffrut and \v{S}ver\'ak in the context of the 2D Euler equations

The end time of SIS epidemics driven by random walks on edge-transitive graphs

Network epidemics is a ubiquitous model that can represent different phenomena and finds applications in various domains. Among its various characteristics, a fundamental question concerns the time when an epidemic stops propagating. We investigate this characteristic on a SIS epidemic induced by agents that move according to independent continuous time random walks on a finite graph: Agents can either be infected (I) or susceptible (S), and infection occurs when two agents with different epidemic states meet in a node. After a random recovery time, an infected agent returns to state S and can be infected again. The End of Epidemic (EoE) denotes the first time where all agents are in state S, since after this moment no further infections can occur and the epidemic stops. For the case of two agents on edge-transitive graphs, we characterize EoE as a function of the network structure by relating the Laplace transform of EoE to the Laplace transform of the meeting time of two random walks. Interestingly, this analysis shows a separation between the effect of network structure and epidemic dynamics. We then study the asymptotic behavior of EoE (asymptotically in the size of the graph) under different parameter scalings, identifying regimes where EoE converges in distribution to a proper random variable or to infinity. We also highlight the impact of different graph structures on EoE, characterizing it under complete graphs, complete bipartite graphs, and rings

Bearing Witness to Sacrifice: Death, Grief and Memorialisation in the Collections of the Canadian War Museum

This article presents a selection of artworks, archival material and artifacts from the Canadian War Museum (CWM) that illuminate how Canadians—soldiers and civilians— have experienced and endured war. By focusing on the themes of death, grief and memorialisation, these items convey how Canadians have borne the sacrifice of war, and the way in which those losses have been memorialised in ways both public and private. Cet article présente une sélection d’oeuvres d’art, de documents d’archives et d’artefacts du Musée canadien de la guerre (MCG) qui illustrent la façon dont les Canadiens – soldates et civils – ont vécu et enduré la guerre. En mettant l’accent sur les thèmes de la mort, du chagrin et de la commémoration, ces articles montrent comment les Canadiens ont supporté le sacrifice de la guerre et la façon dont ces pertes ont été commémorées de manière publique et privée

First-order transition in Potts models with "invisible' states: Rigorous proofs

In some recent papers by Tamura, Tanaka and Kawashima [arXiv:1102.5475, arXiv:1012.4254], a class of Potts models with "invisible" states was introduced, for which the authors argued by numerical arguments and by a mean-field analysis that a first-order transition occurs. Here we show that the existence of this first-order transition can be proven rigorously, by relatively minor adaptations of existing proofs for ordinary Potts models. In our argument we present a random-cluster representation for the model, which might be of independent interest

Wards Of The State: Care And Custody In A Pennsylvania Prison

In this dissertation, I examine the challenges and contradictions as well as the expectations and aspirations involved in the provision of healthcare to inmates in a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. In 1976, the Supreme Court granted inmates a constitutional right to healthcare based on the notion that a failure to do so would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork from 2014-2016 in the prison’s medical unit with inmates, healthcare providers, and correctional staff, I demonstrate how the legal infrastructure built around this right to healthcare operates in practice and the myriad effects it has for those in state custody. Through traversing the scales of legal doctrine, privatized managed care, and collective historical memory, bringing these structural components to life in personal narratives and clinical interactions, I advance the notion that the physical space of the prison’s medical unit is a “ward of the state” – a space of care where the state itself is “made” through interactions among individuals who relay and enact the legal regulations on inmate healthcare. I also argue that incarcerated men themselves are cast as “wards of the state” – the biological and financial property of the state placed in its custody. As such, the state has an obligation to care for inmates as quasi-citizens who are granted a right to healthcare in the setting of rights deprivation as punishment. Even though this right primarily exists as a mandate not to inflict too much harm, it also creates the conditions for which inmates come to rely on the state for life-saving and life-sustaining services, perpetuating historical forms of racial subjugation through care and containment in the process. Finally, I outline the paths inmates make for themselves to find meaning amidst the multitude of losses they experience and to seek belonging amidst disenfranchisement. While the forms of legal, personal, and political recognition that are available to inmates are few, the structural features of an institutionalized right to healthcare open up spaces for them to envision futures and to make both personal and structural appeals to justice with both tragic and hopeful consequences