In this project, I have visualized data taken from the 1858 Imperial Ottoman Penal Code translated in 1913. The translators of this English text, who have much experience in foreign affairs, provide clarity in the legal language which they describe as “less elaborate and refined” than their French counterparts (p. 124). Notably the Imperial Ottoman Penal Code was decreed during the Tanizmat reforms wherein the Ottoman Empire attempted to modernize. For the most part modernization meant adapting in various ways the European methods of various sectors of life such as military, modernization, technology, clothing, and more. We can read where the translators believe the articles are comparable to or against French penal codes throughout their translation, but the focus of this project is specifically on the contents of the articles. Articles 168 through 191 (or part 1 of chapter 2) concern “killing, wounding, beating and threatening” (p. 124). Through tracking the punishments of this crime in maximum sentencing, indefinite imprisonment, or capital punishment, we can see the variance of severity with which the Ottomans considered different violent offenses during the Tanzimat reforms.
Here is a plot with the type of crime on the y-axis and the punishment in ascending years on the x-axis. By hovering over the red dots, you can read supplementary information about additional fines, important details, and which article number the punishment correlates to. I excluded any punishments that warranted capital punishment or life imprisonment as the scale shows the perceived severity of the crime in years. Less serious crimes, those under 2.5 years imprisonment, are often threats, accidents, or otherwise non-severe harm. Crimes of medium-level severity, those between 2.5 to 5 years, are often those that do not result in death but impact the victim’s ability to work or are under the accidental manslaughter category. More severe crimes, those between 6 to 15 or more years, are often premeditated, disabling, murder, or combinations thereof. Some crimes did not specify any sentencing as their punishments were attributed to other categories, such as being an accessory to murder which warrants similar punishments to murder or murder under duress of an authoritative superior which specified who was at fault in specific situations. Notably, I used the absolute maximum sentencing assuming the perpetrator embodied the crime to the fullest description to make comparison simpler across crimes that have minute differences.
## Warning in geom_point(aes(text = paste("<b>Crime:</b>", crime,
## "<br><b>Article:</b>", : Ignoring unknown aesthetics: textHere is a list of the most severe crimes, those that warrant capital punishment or life imprisonment with forced labor. Notably, some of these crimes may be pardoned by the victim’s family, but the perpetrator will still serve time and they still may be executed if they are a repeat offender or if the Sultan orders their execution. Some of these crimes are punished severely to keep the status quo, such as manslaughter against state officials or against family members. Other crimes’ punishments cull individuals who exhibit extended violent tendencies such as torture, commitance of additional crimes, or premeditation.
If I were to work on this project further, I would likely simplify (or complicate, depending on how you look at it) the crime category by only having a handful of categories such as “murder,” “manslaughter,” “assault,” “disabling,” “accessory to crime” and have the specifics such as “premeditation,” “[victim type],” “ambiguity,” etc. be separate true or false categories which would make a variety of categorization based on different features of the crime possible. However, as a scale of severity based on maximum sentencing time and life imprisonment or capital punishment, these two visualizations succeed in portraying how Ottomans regarded violent crimes on a scale during this period of modernization based in the Ottoman penal codes.