Download or read book Criminal Law Homicide written by Adeyemi Oshunrinade and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2015-04-10 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book Criminal Law: Homicide deals specifically on homicide as a subject in criminal law. With the book, I carefully carved homicide law out of criminal law by focusing on court cases dealing with homicide and by asking thought-provoking questions that provide better understanding and knowledge of the crime of homicide as a branch of criminal law.
Download or read book Felony Murder written by Guyora Binder and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-05-09 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The felony murder doctrine is one of the most widely criticized features of American criminal law. Legal scholars almost unanimously condemn it as irrational, concluding that it imposes punishment without fault and presumes guilt without proof. Despite this, the law persists in almost every U.S. jurisdiction. Felony Murder is the first book on this controversial legal doctrine. It shows that felony murder liability rests on a simple and powerful idea: that the guilt incurred in attacking or endangering others depends on one's reasons for doing so. Inflicting harm is wrong, and doing so for a bad motive—such as robbery, rape, or arson—aggravates that wrong. In presenting this idea, Guyora Binder criticizes prevailing academic theories of criminal intent for trying to purge criminal law of moral judgment. Ultimately, Binder shows that felony murder law has been and should remain limited by its justifying aims.
Download or read book Insanity written by Charles Patrick Ewing and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-07 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The insanity defense is one of the oldest fixtures of the Anglo-American legal tradition. Though it is available to people charged with virtually any crime, and is often employed without controversy, homicide defendants who raise the insanity defense are often viewed by the public and even the legal system as trying to get away with murder. Often it seems that legal result of an insanity defense is unpredictable, and is determined not by the defendants mental state, but by their lawyers and psychologists influence. From the thousands of murder cases in which defendants have claimed insanity, Doctor Ewing has chosen ten of the most influential and widely varied. Some were successful in their insanity plea, while others were rejected. Some of the defendants remain household names years after the fact, like Jack Ruby, while others were never nationally publicized. Regardless of the circumstances, each case considered here was extremely controversial, hotly contested, and relied heavily on lengthy testimony by expert psychologists and psychiatrists. Several of them played a major role in shaping the criminal justice system as we know it today. In this book, Ewing skillfully conveys the psychological and legal drama of each case, while providing important and fresh professional insights. For the legal or psychological professional, as well as the interested reader, Insanity will take you into the minds of some of the most incomprehensible murderers of our age.
Download or read book Forms of Murder Codified in Criminal Law written by Marko Nikolic? and published by Society Publishing. This book was released on 2017-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the world's first Codes mankind (or the then rulers) is trying to separate, and then devise a punishment for losing one's life in someone else's fault. Even the most famous and best preserved ancient Mesopotamia Code that was found in 1902 in the Iranian city of Susa contains significant parts relating to these offenses. A long way was waiting until today's modern laws in all their complexity.Homicide offenses range from those related to negligent conduct, as in criminally negligent homicide, to heinous intent murders, like capital murder. One of the highest categories of homicide is felony murder; next to capital murder, most states consider this the most severe degrees of murder. The US federal felony-murder statute requires the government to prove that a murder occurred and then calls for a determination of the degree of the murder for sentencing purposes. The government must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant acted with "malice aforethought" in order to obtain a conviction. The felony-murder statute is not, however, the only federal statute that seeks to punish a defendant for a felony-related death. These are the questions we are starting our book with. Homicide is the killing of one person by another. Every state has some type of homicide statute, but the concept behind the homicide charge evolved from common law principles. Under common law, homicide is classified in three ways including justifiable homicide, excusable homicide, and criminal homicide. Murder is a homicide crime defined as the intentional killing of one human being by another with malice aforethought. Malice aforethought is a state of mind, or intent, requirement that makes a homicide a murder. It is this state of mind that differentiates murder from other types of criminal homicide like voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.Involuntary manslaughter is defined as the unlawful killing of a human being without malice aforethought. In order to be involuntary manslaughter, the killing must have been unintentional. Different states have different definitions of or requirements for involuntary manslaughterThe phrase "degrees of murder" refers to the intent or severity of a particular murder charge. Some states define their degrees of murder numerically. Common degrees of murder include first degree murder and second degree murder. Other states place specific labels on their murder offenses, such as capital murder, murder, and justifiable homicide. Despite the label of the degree of murder, the idea is to gradually increase the punishment with the degree. The more egregious the killing, or the motive behind a killing, then the higher the degree of punishment for that type of murder charge.The Castle Doctrine is a self-defense theory which gives a homeowner the right to protect his home with the use of deadly force. The Castle Doctrine originally emerged as a common law theory. And the editors felt theneed to mention this doctrine separately.Homicide is a leading cause of childhood death in the developed world, and Most child victims of homicide are killed by a parent or step-parent and what is the role of mental illnes in those cases. This will be dealt with in chapter five. The following chapter will mention the topic of gun violence as an ongoing problem in the United States of America and the relationship between the legal availability of guns and the firearm-related homicide rate.External causes of death comprise a heterogeneous collection of events including the three major categories of suicide, homicide, and accidental death. These causes of death represent a significant proportion of potentially preventable mortality in the United States. Risk factors associated with external causes of death have been limited in the number of covariates investigated and external causes examined in chapter seven.Homicides refer to interpersonal violence. Civilian and military deaths during interstate wars, civil wars and genocides are not counted as homicides. Mid 19th century, technologies that we take for granted today had not yet been discovered or widely used in solving crime. Innovations like fingerprinting, ballistics, hair and fiber analysis, and blood evidence had not yet been developed, and crimes were solved quickly or not at all. We rememeber that time in chapter 9. In chapter 10 we explore whether or not contagion is evident in more high-profile incidents, such as school shootings and mass killings (incidents with four or more people killed).We will contine with the questions of penalty and punishment untill we reach the very end of this edition where we take on the psyhological aspect of pre murderous kindness and postmurder grief of the perpetrator themselves.
Download or read book Lacey Wells and Quick Reconstructing Criminal Law written by Celia Wells and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-27 with total page 1715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication of the first edition, this textbook has offered one of the most distinctive and innovative approaches to the study of criminal law. Looking at both traditional and emerging areas, such as public order offences and corporate manslaughter, it offers a broad and thorough perspective on the subject. Material is organised thematically and is clearly signposted at the beginning of each section to allow the student to navigate successfully through the different fields. This fourth edition looks at topical issues such as policing, the Serious Crime Act 2007, and reform of the Fraud Act 2006. Relevant case law and extracts from the most topical and engaging debates on the subject give the subject immediacy. The book is essential for both undergraduate and postgraduate study of criminal law and justice.
Download or read book Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse written by Sarah Tarlow and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.
Download or read book Judging Evil written by Samuel H. Pillsbury and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2000-07 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do killers deserve punishment? How should the law decide? These are the questions Samuel H. Pillsbury seeks to answer in this important new book on the theory and practice of criminal responsibility. In an argument both traditional and fresh, Pillsbury holds that persons deserve punishment according to the evil they choose to do, regardless of their psychological capacities. After considering potential objections to this approach, including those based on determinism, unjust social conditions, and the alleged cruelty of retribution, he presents an extended critique of American homicide law. Using real case examples, Pillsbury offers concrete proposals for legal reform, urging that modern preoccupations with subjective aspects of wrongdoing be replaced with rules that focus more on the individual's motives.
Download or read book Murder and the Reasonable Man written by Cynthia Lee and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2007-10-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man murders his wife after she has admitted her infidelity; another man kills an openly gay teammate after receiving a massage; a third man, white, goes for a jog in a “bad” neighborhood, carrying a pistol, and shoots an African American teenager who had his hands in his pockets. When brought before the criminal justice system, all three men argue that they should be found “not guilty”; the first two use the defense of provocation, while the third argues he used his gun in self-defense. Drawing upon these and similar cases, Cynthia Lee shows how two well-established, traditional criminal law defenses—the doctrines of provocation and self-defense—enable majority-culture defendants to justify their acts of violence. While the reasonableness requirement, inherent in both defenses, is designed to allow community input and provide greater flexibility in legal decision-making, the requirement also allows majority-culture defendants to rely on dominant social norms, such as masculinity, heterosexuality, and race (i.e., racial stereotypes), to bolster their claims of reasonableness. At the same time, Lee examines other cases that demonstrate that the reasonableness requirement tends to exclude the perspectives of minorities, such as heterosexual women, gays and lesbians, and persons of color. Murder and the Reasonable Man not only shows how largely invisible social norms and beliefs influence the outcomes of certain criminal cases, but goes further, suggesting three tentative legal reforms to address problems of bias and undue leniency. Ultimately, Lee cautions that the true solution lies in a change in social attitudes.
Download or read book Deliberate Intent written by Rodney A. Smolla and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 1999 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting account of the landmark "Hit Man Case"--involving a man who hired a contract killer to execute his ex-wife, his severely brain-damaged son, and the boy's nurse--written by a noted First Amendment attorney who risked his reputation and career to take on the case.
Download or read book Homicide Justified written by Andrew Fede and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comparative study looks at the laws concerning the murder of slaves by their masters and at how these laws were implemented. Andrew T. Fede cites a wide range of cases--across time, place, and circumstance--to illuminate legal, judicial, and other complexities surrounding this regrettably common occurrence. These laws had evolved to limit in different ways the masters' rights to severely punish and even kill their slaves while protecting valuable enslaved people, understood as "property," from wanton destruction by hirers, overseers, and poor whites who did not own slaves. To explore the conflicts of masters' rights with state and colonial laws, Fede shows how slave homicide law evolved and was enforced not only in the United States but also in ancient Roman, Visigoth, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and British jurisdictions. His comparative approach reveals how legal reforms regarding slave homicide in antebellum times, like past reforms dictated by emperors and kings, were the products of changing perceptions of the interests of the public; of the individual slave owners; and of the slave owners' families, heirs, and creditors. Although some slave murders came to be regarded as capital offenses, the laws con-sistently reinforced the second-class status of slaves. This influence, Fede concludes, flowed over into the application of law to free African Americans and would even make itself felt in the legal attitudes that underlay the Jim Crow era.
Download or read book Murder in Law written by Veronica Heley and published by Severn House Publishers Ltd. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Ellie's away, murder will play . . . Is the death of Ellie's son-in-law really the result of a burglary gone wrong? Ellie's absence abroad is disastrous for her daughter, Diana - when her husband is attacked by intruders and left for dead one night, it falls to Ellie's next-door neighbour, Susan, to reluctantly pick up the pieces and take in Diana's children. Is Evan's death really the result of a burglary gone wrong? Joining forces with her aunt, police officer Lesley Millard, Susan discovers that Diana lied to the police about her movements on the night of the murder, and soon finds herself grappling with betrayal, shady business dealings and her own distrust of Diana as she attempts to solve a chilling conundrum: could Ellie's daughter be a cold-blooded killer?
Download or read book A Lesser Species of Homicide written by Kerry King and published by UWA Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There has been a dearth of longitudinal attention to the prosecution of ‘road traffic deaths’ in Australia and worldwide, surprising given more than 50 million people have died or been killed to date. Globally, the ‘road toll’ is estimated at 1.35 million per year. Almost all of those deaths are attributable to some form of human error. A Lesser Species of Homicide examines the shifting nexus where human error, fault, act or omission meet the question of criminal liability. In the first study of its kind in the world, Kerry King examines how parliaments, prosecutors, police and the courts have responded to deaths occasioned by the use of motor vehicles from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including the extent to which the community and judiciary have been prepared to label driving conduct culpable. She explores how our weddedness to the residual notion of ‘accident’, to speed, drink-driving, risk, masculinity and the broader driving culture, have intersected with the tenets of intention, negligence, dangerousness and carelessness to affect judgments about drivers’ conduct. Drawing on hundreds of cases, King carefully traces the construction of offences and case law while observing key emerging themes, including approaches to multiple fatalities, outcomes in cases involving vulnerable road users, the difficulties with prosecuting intoxicated drivers and, most importantly, trends in charging standards and sentencing. For rigour, one Australian jurisdiction, Western Australia, has been chosen as the site of inquiry, yet there is little evidence to suggest that the trends explored herein are peculiar or exceptional. The status quo elsewhere in Australia and overseas appears remarkably similar. A Lesser Species of Homicide seeks to explore how and why deaths on the road have been treated as a species apart.
Download or read book Murder at the Supreme Court written by Martin Clancy and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a unique behind the scenes look at the capital punishment cases that made it to the highest court in the land.
Download or read book Medieval and Early Modern Murder written by Larissa Tracy and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2021-03-19 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wealth of sources from different disciplines, the essays here provide a nuanced picture of how medieval and early modern societies viewed murder and dealth with murderers.
Download or read book Survived by One written by Robert E. Hanlon and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-06 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 8, 1985, 18-year-old Tom Odle brutally murdered his parents and three siblings in the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon, sending shockwaves throughout the nation. The murder of the Odle family remains one of the most horrific family mass murders in U.S. history. Odle was sentenced to death and, after seventeen years on death row, expected a lethal injection to end his life. However, Illinois governor George Ryan’s moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, and later commutation of all death sentences in 2003, changed Odle’s sentence to natural life. The commutation of his death sentence was an epiphany for Odle. Prior to the commutation of his death sentence, Odle lived in denial, repressing any feelings about his family and his horrible crime. Following the commutation and the removal of the weight of eventual execution associated with his death sentence, he was confronted with an unfamiliar reality. A future. As a result, he realized that he needed to understand why he murdered his family. He reached out to Dr. Robert Hanlon, a neuropsychologist who had examined him in the past. Dr. Hanlon engaged Odle in a therapeutic process of introspection and self-reflection, which became the basis of their collaboration on this book. Hanlon tells a gripping story of Odle’s life as an abused child, the life experiences that formed his personality, and his tragic homicidal escalation to mass murder, seamlessly weaving into the narrative Odle’s unadorned reflections of his childhood, finding a new family on death row, and his belief in the powers of redemption. As our nation attempts to understand the continual mass murders occurring in the U.S., Survived by One sheds some light on the psychological aspects of why and how such acts of extreme carnage may occur. However, Survived by One offers a never-been-told perspective from the mass murderer himself, as he searches for the answers concurrently being asked by the nation and the world.
Download or read book Anatomy of Injustice written by Raymond Bonner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row. In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.
Download or read book Murder Was Not a Crime written by Judy E. Gaughan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embarking on a unique study of Roman criminal law, Judy Gaughan has developed a novel understanding of the nature of social and political power dynamics in republican government. Revealing the significant relationship between political power and attitudes toward homicide in the Roman republic, Murder Was Not a Crime describes a legal system through which families (rather than the government) were given the power to mete out punishment for murder. With implications that could modify the most fundamental beliefs about the Roman republic, Gaughan's research maintains that Roman criminal law did not contain a specific enactment against murder, although it had done so prior to the overthrow of the monarchy. While kings felt an imperative to hold monopoly over the power to kill, Gaughan argues, the republic phase ushered in a form of decentralized government that did not see itself as vulnerable to challenge by an act of murder. And the power possessed by individual families ensured that the government would not attain the responsibility for punishing homicidal violence. Drawing on surviving Roman laws and literary sources, Murder Was Not a Crime also explores the dictator Sulla's "murder law," arguing that it lacked any government concept of murder and was instead simply a collection of earlier statutes repressing poisoning, arson, and the carrying of weapons. Reinterpreting a spectrum of scenarios, Gaughan makes new distinctions between the paternal head of household and his power over life and death, versus the power of consuls and praetors to command and kill.
