Homicide

• 1. Introduction

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  Homicide is an act in which a person causes the death of another person. The word covers far more than the crimes most people picture. A homicide requires only a volitional act, or an omission, that causes a death. That means a homicide can be accidental, reckless, or negligent, even when no one ever meant to cause harm. The same broad category holds murder and manslaughter. It also holds justifiable killings, assassination, killing in war, euthanasia, and capital punishment. Some of these acts are treated as crimes. Others are permitted, and some are ordered by the legal system itself. How does one word stretch across an executioner, a soldier, a frightened homeowner, and a careless driver? And why do societies punish one death by another person, yet sanction the next?

• 2. Degrees Of Intent

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  Criminal homicide is split into two broad categories, murder and manslaughter, sorted by the state of mind and intent of the person who caused the death. Murder is the most serious crime that can be charged following a homicide. In many jurisdictions it carries life in prison or even capital punishment.

  First-degree murder is the premeditated, unlawful, intentional killing of another person. Second-degree murder is intentional and unlawful too, but without premeditation. The line between them is planning.

  The felony murder rule, as it is known in the United States, removes the question of intent entirely. A person who commits a felony may be guilty of murder if someone dies as a result of the crime. That can include the victim of the felony, a bystander, or a co-felon. It applies even when the death results from the actions of a third party reacting to the crime.

  Manslaughter sits one rung below. Here the person either does not intend to kill, or kills as the result of circumstances that would push a reasonable person toward an emotionally or mentally disturbed loss of control. Voluntary manslaughter is the intentional but unpremeditated killing born of a disturbed state of mind, or heat of passion. Involuntary manslaughter is unintentional, the product of reckless indifference to others' lives or foreseeable negligence. The push may be deliberate. The death, by a subsequent fall and a lethal head injury, is not.

  The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes traced to the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.

• 3. Lawful Excuse

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  Not all homicides are crimes. Some are legally privileged, meaning they are not criminal acts at all, while others give the defendant a full or partial defense against prosecution. Self-defense is the most widely recognized. The right to defend oneself, and often to defend others, can extend in dire circumstances to the use of deadly force.

  Mental incapacity offers another path. A defendant may try to show they are not criminally responsible because of a mental disorder, and in some jurisdictions a mentally incompetent killer may be involuntarily committed instead of tried. In the United States, the death penalty cannot be applied to convicted murderers with intellectual disabilities.

  Small children fall under the defense of infancy, held not criminally liable before the age of criminal responsibility. A juvenile court may handle older minors, though because homicide is so serious, some are charged in the adult system. Justifiable homicide covers the rest, where the killing is simply not unlawful. A killing on the battlefield is normally lawful, as is a police officer shooting a dangerous suspect to protect lives.

  The availability of these defenses can shift the homicide rate itself. The "stand your ground" defense has been suggested to raise homicide rates in U.S. jurisdictions that recognize it, including Florida.

• 4. Killing By The State

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  Homicides committed by state actors may be lawful or unlawful according to municipal law, international law agreed to by treaty, and peremptory norms enforced on all states, such as the prohibitions against genocide, piracy, and slavery. Capital punishment is one type, though many countries have abolished it. Others include lawful killings during war, the lawful use of deadly force by security forces, extrajudicial killings without court proceedings, and war crimes involving killing.

  Widespread, systematic killing of a particular group by the state can be called genocide, politicide, or classicide, and in some cases meets the definition of a crime against humanity. Genocide scholars have proposed the term mass killing for certain large-scale killings of non-combatants by state actors. Some medium- and large-scale examples have been called massacres. The American political scientist Rudolph Rummel coined "democide" to describe murder by government in general.

  Dartmouth College professor Benjamin Valentino divides mass killings into two major categories, dispossessive and coercive. The dispossessive group has four subcategories: communist, fascist, ethnic, and territorial. He cites the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cambodian genocide as communist examples, and the Holocaust among the fascist ones. The Armenian and Rwandan genocides fall under ethnic mass killing, while the American Indian Wars and the Herero and Nama genocide are territorial. His coercive category covers counterinsurgency, terrorist, and imperialist killings, with examples drawn from the Algerian War, the Soviet-Afghan War, and German and Japanese imperialism during World War II.

  Domestic legal definitions of murder and manslaughter usually exclude killings carried out by lawful government action, even as commentators may call them murder or mass murder.

• 5. A Number In The Hundreds Of Thousands

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  Nearly 464,000 people around the world were killed in homicides in 2017, according to a United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime report issued in July 2019. That figure dwarfed the 89,000 killed in armed conflicts over the same period. An earlier UNODC study, drawing on sources from 207 countries, the World Health Organization, and UN field offices, estimated 468,000 homicides in 2010.

  In that 2010 picture, more than a third, 36 percent, occurred in Africa, with 31 percent in the Americas, 27 percent in Asia, five percent in Europe, and one percent in Oceania. Of all victims worldwide, 82 percent were men and 18 percent were women. On a per-capita scale, the homicide rate in Africa and the Americas, at 17 and 16 per 100,000 population, ran more than double the global average of 6.9 per 100,000.

  By 2012 the total had dropped to 437,000, with a world average rate of 6.2 per 100,000. About 41 percent of those homicides used guns, 24 percent involved stabbing with sharp objects, and 35 percent used other means such as poison. The global conviction rate for intentional homicide that year was 43 percent. The 2011 study found that homicide is much more common in countries with low human development, high income inequality, and weak rule of law. In intimate partner and family-related cases, women killed by a past or present male partner make up the vast majority of victims worldwide.

• 6. The Long European Decline

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  In the mid-second millennium, local levels of violence in Europe were extremely high by the standards of modern developed countries. Small groups of people would battle their neighbors using the farm tools at hand, knives, sickles, hammers, and axes. Mayhem and death were deliberate.

  The vast majority of Europeans lived in rural areas until 1800, and cities were few and small, though their concentration of population bred violence of its own. From about 1200 AD through 1800 AD, homicide rates from violent local episodes, not counting military actions, fell by a factor of ten, from roughly 32 deaths per 100,000 people to 3.2 per 100,000. In the 20th century the rate fell further, to 1.4 per 100,000. Italy's decline came later and slower than the rest.

  Police forces seldom existed outside the cities, and prisons only became common after 1800. Before then, harsh penalties such as severe whipping or execution proved ineffective at controlling the insults to honor that precipitated most of the violence. The decline does not correlate with economics or measures of state control. Most historians instead attribute it to a steady increase in self-control, of the sort promoted by Protestantism and necessitated by schools and factories. Eisner argues that macro-level indicators of societal efforts to promote civility, self-discipline, and long-sightedness are strongly associated with the swings in homicide rates over the past six centuries.

• 7. The American Ledger

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  In 2020, there were 18,439 cases of single homicide across the 48 states and DC tracked by the National Violent Death Reporting System, a rate of 6.7 per 100,000 inhabitants. That database draws on death certificates, coroner and medical examiner records, and law enforcement reports, and began collecting data in 2003 under the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. The same year saw 695 cases of multiple homicide and 571 cases of homicide followed by suicide, lifting the overall rate to 7.5 per 100,000.

  Firearms were used in 76.7 percent of homicides overall, followed by sharp instruments at 9 percent, blunt instruments at 3 percent, personal weapons such as hands or feet at 2.5 percent, and strangulation or suffocation at 1.5 percent. A house or apartment was the most common location at 41 percent, then a street or highway at 22 percent, and a motor vehicle at 10 percent.

  Precipitating circumstances were identified in 69 percent of cases. One-third of homicides with known circumstances began with an argument or conflict, and 15 percent were tied to intimate partner violence. Another 23 percent were precipitated by a separate crime, and in 66 percent of those the crime was in progress, including robbery and drug trade. A larger share of female victims than male resulted from caregiver abuse or neglect, 9.0 percent versus 2.7 percent.

  The overall firearm homicide rate in 2020 ran higher than in the previous 20 years, borne disproportionately by Native Americans and Black persons. The increase is thought to track the social and economic stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.