Overview of Database Methodology

At the moment, the database lists key information about all of the people sentenced to death in New South Wales during the Darling and Bourke period, 1826-1837, including their name, gender, crime and ultimate sentence. Not all information can be traced, and work on the database is still ongoing. If you would like to help with the compliation of data about death sentences from this and other periods please contact us.

The core database was compiled from a number of archival sources:

  1. Supreme Court Informations (1824 – 1837, State Records of New South Wales [SRNSW] T19 – T44). These are the formal documents by which individuals were brought before the Court to be tried. A separate Information exists in respect of each crime, identifying the names of the accused, the place of the crime and relevant particulars of the crime as charged. They often also include a record of the verdict and sentence. Almost all of the Informations survive and those for the period 1824 to 1836 have been indexed chronologically by SRNSW.
  2. Returns of Prisoners Convicted by the Supreme Court (Returns of Prisoners Convicted by the Supreme Court SRNSW X730 (1825-1834), X731 (1834-1837)).These were prepared at the direction of Chief Justice Forbes from May 1825 onwards, and they contain a summary of all sentences passed by the Court in individual cases.
  3. Judges' Reports to the Executive Council. These were prepared by the Supreme Court judges for the Executive Council about each of the individual prisoners who had received death sentences, other than murder cases. These reports are contained in a series of separate volumes of Appendices to the Minutes of the Executive Council (Appendices to the Minutes of the Executive Council, Vols.1-7, 1825-1836, SRNSW 4/1438-4/1447).
  4. Executive Council Minutes (Minutes of the Executive Council of New South Wales, 1826-1836, SRNSW 4/1516-4/1519. Some of these records are available on microfilm, SRNSW Reel 2436, 2437). The Minutes contain the formal record of the decisions in each of the individual capital cases in the colony, whether the sentence by the Court was 'death recorded' or 'death passed', with the exception of murder cases. This restriction, together with the requirement prior to 1837 that murderers be executed within three days of being sentenced, meant that murder cases were only rarely considered by the Executive Council and there are only a limited number of judges' reports to the Council in relation to such cases.
  5. Annual Returns, or Blue Books, submitted by the Colonial Secretary to the British Colonial Office. ((SRNSW 4/253– 4/268)). These were used to cross check the accuracy of the database. Some minor discrepancies were found when comparing the Blue Books statistics with other records, particularly in relation to execution statistics. These errors may have been due to poor record-keeping in the Sheriff's Office, whose records of executions have not been located. As the Blue Books were often compiled many months after the executions occurred, other contemporaneous records have been preferred in the case of doubt in compiling the database.