Abstract
Excerpted From: Jeffrey S. Adler, I Laid Earl and Clementine on a Chair and Whipped Them’: Child Murder and Criminal Justice in the Jim Crow South, 63 American Journal of Legal History 19 (March, 2023) (128 Footnotes) (Full Document)
On 6 April 1945, Ernestine Bonneval, a 26-year-old, white, New Orleans farm worker, tied her children to an ironing board balanced on two chairs and savagely whipped them with a home-made cat-o'-nine-tails lash, killing 7-year-old Clementine and severely injuring 6-yearold Earl and 4-year-old Genevieve. The murderous beating ‘walloped the public sensibilities' of New Orleanians. Violence had long seared daily life in the Louisiana city. For decades, New Orleans had suffered from one of the highest homicide rates in the nation and had often ranked among the five most murderous urban centers in the United States. But, even by local standards, this crime ‘brought gasps'. ‘The Bonneval case stands out here’, a newspaper editor explained, because it was so ‘revolting’.
Ernestine's brutality especially shocked residents. In part, the crime seemed particularly jarring because the killer was white. Although white New Orleanians committed homicide at high rates, they celebrated their racial superiority, took immense pride in their level of civility, and associated violence with African Americans. The viciousness of the flogging also made the murder distinctive. The killer divulged to police investigators that she had been lashing her children for months and had particularly battered ‘my babies' for the five days before Clementine's death. On the day of the lethal assault, co-workers at the dairy where she lived and tended the livestock testified that Bonneval had beaten her young son and daughters for hours, despite their efforts to restrain her. The policemen at the crime scene and the parish coroner revealed that the children's ‘entire bodies' were ‘covered with bruises', their faces, torsos, legs, and hands mangled from the floggings. They also described Clementine, Earl, and Genevieve as ‘grossly neglected, very thin, under fed, very dirty’, and shoeless.
Clementine's age and death at the hands of her mother made the murder unusual and more disturbing. Filicides (or child murders) were very rare. Between 1920 and 1945, only 2 percent of local homicide victims died at the hands of their parents, and those under the age of 10 accounted for 1 percent of victims. Mothers committed just four filicides during this era, and white mothers killing their young children comprised 0.01 percent of killers. Early twentieth-century New Orleanians were accustomed and even inured to deadly brawling in the French Quarter, robbery-homicides in Canal Street alleys, and spousal violence, but not child killing and especially not murdering mothers.
Bonneval's demeanor added to the spectacle and stunned the veteran cops at the crime scene. The killer casually recounted the deadly whipping, matter-of-factly detailing months of barbarous child abuse, and quickly signed a formal statement, acknowledging the brutality. Ernestine even boasted how she had created the murder weapon. ‘I made a whip from a rubber hose, which was about three feet long, with lashes on it which I used to run the cows out of the stable with’, she calmly told patrolman Pascal Calogero, adding that she used the 3-foot lash and a longer one to flog ‘my babies'. The killer said that for six months she had beaten the children with her hand and sticks but had begun lashing them with the cat-o'-nine-tails during the month preceding the final whipping. Bonneval used the shorter lash for 4-year-old Genevieve and reserved the 4-foot version for Clementine (aka ‘Teeny’) and 6-year-old Earl. Her statement nonchalantly chronicled daily thrashings in the week before Clementine's death. The grizzled cops who investigated the killing, each with more than two decades on the job, characterized the young mother as ‘very cool and collective [sic] all the time and at no time did show any signs of being nervous or bereaved as to what occurred’. Nor did the sergeant who took her statement after the killing detect any hint of contrition or remorse. Ernestine's only show of emotion arose in response to the police arrest report describing the young victims as barefooted. ‘My children have shoes', she snarled, ‘but Earl and Clementine would not keep their shoes on’.
Far from recognizing the grim reality of Clementine's death, Ernestine appeared indifferent, even defiant. She seemed to covet media attention, however, granting interviews to journalists and unemotionally recounting episode after episode of vicious child abuse. Bonneval also posed for photographs, brandishing the hose that she had transformed into a deadly whip. Accounts of the crime, and the accompanying pictures, splashed across newspapers from Florida to Hawaii.
White New Orleanians demanded justice for Teeny Bonneval, some insisting that Ernestine deserved the gallows. Not even the ‘progress of the war and the jar of the President's death’, the New Orleans Item remarked, ‘pushed from the public mind’ outrage and calls for swift, severe punishment. Criminal justice officials concurred. The parish district attorney instructed the police to charge Ernestine with murder. Newspaper editors asked ‘how can such things be?’ A grand jury indicted the killer for manslaughter, an offense that carried a maximum sentence of 20 years, and a criminal court jury quickly returned a guilty verdict. But, to the horror of New Orleanians, the trial judge sentenced Bonneval to only one year in the state penitentiary, the minimum punishment for the offense. After initial disbelief at the sentence, however, white New Orleans residents, editors, and community leaders expressed overwhelming approval and support for Judge J. Bernard Cocke's decision, calling him ‘wise and merciful’.
At first blush, Cocke's ruling seems inexplicable, a case of judicial discretion run amok. But both Judge Cocke's decision to impose the minimum prison term for the unrepentant child killer and the sudden pivot in public opinion and outpouring of sympathy for the murdering mother reflected larger trends in criminal justice. The sentence, and reactions to it, illustrated important shifts in the role of the state in the Jim Crow South. A national juvenile delinquency panic and Southern gender ideals influenced perceptions of the crime and the killer as well. But, most important, a racial framework for explaining violence shaped and reshaped white New Orleanians' reactions to Ernestine Bonneval and her actions.
Jim Crow and racialized notions of crime and punishment determined white residents' abruptly shifting views of Clementine Bonneval's murder, underscoring the powerful, farranging, and often invisible scope of their ‘white racial frame’. Everyone involved in the case--the killer, the victim, the witnesses, the police investigators, the prosecutors, the jurors, and the judge--was white. Quantitative homicide data, however, reveals that white perceptions of race and racial difference infused their feeling about Clementine's death, Ernestine's culpability and punishment, and the operation of the criminal justice system.
A white mother could not be a vicious monster in their binary moral and legal taxonomy. The deadly beating of her 7-year-old daughter notwithstanding, Ernestine Bonneval could not be judged a depraved killer. Over the course of the early twentieth century, notions of decency and virtue became increasingly intertwined with whiteness and racial supremacy in New Orleans, while violence and deviance became identified with Blackness and racial inferiority. The courts and Southern legal institutions embraced, reified, and sustained this framework. In unspoken ways, the defense of white supremacy shaped the legal resolution of the murder of Clementine Bonneval.
[. . .]
Ernestine Bonneval's treatment by local courts, ranging from juvenile court to criminal court, reflected the wider modernization of legal institutions in Jim Crow New Orleans and the Deep South. The New Deal encouraged white Southerners to become more receptive to government authority, and the juvenile delinquency panic lent a new urgency to state initiatives regarding children. Gender ideals also blunted demands for the draconian punishment of Ernestine Bonneval. But race shaped the expression and confluence of these forces. The emerging, more activist stance of the courts to preserve stability operated squarely within the Jim Crow racial hierarchy, empowering the legal system to exercise greater authority in a manner that both criminalized African American residents and refrained from criminalizing white residents.
Shifting white attitudes toward the law and the state, therefore, revealed a distinctly Southern form of legal modernization, simultaneously reflecting national reform currents, and bolstering regional racial sensibilities. Parallel transformations occurred in policing and punishment. In law enforcement, Southern whites denounced third-degree interrogation methods for white suspects while encouraging police detectives to employ coercion to extract confessions from African American suspects. Similarly, police use of deadly force against whites decreased at the same time that it increased against African American suspects. Early twentieth-century Southern penal reform enhanced white authority. The centralization of parole and pardon decisions as well as the shift from the gallows to the electric chair, cast at legal reform, bolstered the power of the region's racial demagogues. Across the South, policymakers embraced criminal justice modernization in ways that nodded to national reform currents but reinforced white supremacy and demonized African Americans.
These powerful regional forces affected the punishment of white killers and white New Orleanians' changing interpretations of Ernestine Bonneval and her brutal crime. Stereotyped white perceptions of African American residents as violent predators generated more lenient, forgiving attitudes toward white offenders, even murdering mothers. White supremacy distorted the modernization of Southern criminal justice.
Professor of History and Criminology and Distinguished Teaching Scholar, Department of History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-7320, USA. Email:
