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Homicide

Homicide is the killing of a human being. For obvious reasons, it is one of the most important topics in
criminal law.
Not all homicides are unlawful. Some killings are purely accidental, resulting from neither ill-will nor
negligence. Other killings are justified for reasons of self-defense, or excused for reasons of insanity, for
example. We will study those topics in more detail when we cover affirmative defenses. In this unit, we
will focus on unlawful killings, and particularly on the different types of homicide.
Courts divided homicide into two categories:

murder -unlawful killing with malice aforethought


manslaughter- unlawful killing without malice
This division was made in part to ensure the death penalty for the most serious killings murders while
allowing non-capital sanctions for manslaughter.
Courts and legislatures eventually made further divisions.
Murder was divided into two degrees: premeditated murder constituted murder in the first degree, while
all others were second-degree.
Manslaughter was also divided into voluntary manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter.
The divisions did not stop there. Modern homicide statutes in most states contain numerous provisions,
with different offenses resulting in different punishments. Modern statutes often retain some of the basic
common law divisions, but also add many other types of homicide. For example, in many jurisdictions, in
addition to premeditated murder, murder of a police office is another form of first-degree murder. Some
states have added killing during a rape, killing resulting from child-abuse, killing in furtherance of
terrorism, and so on. Like many criminal statutes, homicide statutes generally accrete over time as
legislatures add new provisions.
The drafters of the Model Penal Code sought to simply the definitions of homicide. They divided
homicide into three basic crimes: murder, manslaughter, and negligent homicide. The basic dividing lines
between these crimes corresponded to the MPCs mens rea framework.
Those efforts at simplification may have been laudable but they were not successful. Even states that
initially adopted MPC-based homicide provisions have continued to change their statutes over time,
resulting in numerous statutory variations and a continued process of accretion. Modern statutory
homicide law is increasingly complicated, still reflecting common law and MPC principles, but also
drifting further from both. New Yorks murder statute, for example, now has 13 different forms of first-
degree murder; Minnesotas statute has 7. It is safe to predict that the process of statutory accretion will
continue in the future.
The only way to know exactly what the law is now is to look at the homicide statute in your
jurisdiction.
People v. Eulo (death defined: cardiorespirataory criteria, but when respiratory and circulatory
functions supported through artificial means then , brain death)
The issue in this case was failure to provide adequate instruction to the juries as to what constitutes a
person's death, the time at which criminal liability for a homicide would attach.
Courts have not engaged in a metaphysical analysis of when life should be deemed to have passed from a
person's body, leaving him or her dead. Rather, they have conceptualized death as the absence of life,
unqualified and undefined. On a practical level, this broad conception of death was substantially narrowed
through recognition of the cardiorespiratory criteria for determining when death occurs. Under these
criteria, the loci of life are the heart and the lungs: where there is no breath or heartbeat, there is no life.
Cessation manifests death.
Ordinarily, death will be determined according to the traditional criteria of irreversible cardiorespiratory
repose. When, however, the respiratory and circulatory functions are maintained by mechanical means,
their significance, as signs of life, is at best ambiguous. Under such circumstances, death may
nevertheless be deemed to occur when, according to accepted medical practice, it is determined that the
entire brain's function has irreversibly ceased.
In the absence of any statute defining death, some jurisdictions have judicially adopted brain-based
criteria for determining death
Intervening and superseding cause:
If the victims were properly diagnosed as dead, of course, no subsequent medical procedure such as the
organ removals would be deemed a cause of death.
If victims' deaths were prematurely pronounced due to a doctor's negligence, the subsequent procedures
may have been a cause of death, but that negligence would not constitute a superseding cause of death
relieving defendants of liability.
If, however, the pronouncements of death were premature due to the gross negligence or the intentional
wrongdoing of doctors, as determined by a grave deviation from accepted medical practices or disregard
for legally cognizable criteria for determining death, the intervening medical procedure would interrupt
the chain of causation and become the legal cause of death

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