Opinion ID: 848794
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the sole element distinguishing manslaughter and murder is malice

Text: An examination of the historical development of homicide law informs this Court that manslaughter is a necessarily included lesser offense of murder because the elements of manslaughter are included in the offense of murder.
In early English common law, a killing was either justifiable homicide; excusable murder committed by misadventure or accident, or in self-defense; or capital murder, characterized by malice aforethought and punishable by death. See 2 Pollock and Maitland, The History of English Law (Cambridge: University Press, 1952), ch. VIII, Crime and Tort, § 2, p. 485. However, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, an exemption called the benefit of clergy was widely used as a device to mitigate mandatory death sentences. Hall, Legal fictions and moral reasoning: Capital punishment and the mentally retarded defendant after Penry v. Johnson, 35 Akron L. R. 327, 353 (2002). The benefit of clergy was an exemption that allowed an offender to be sentenced by the ecclesiastical courts, which did not impose capital punishment. [8] Though it was initially intended to benefit clergy, it also benefitted persons who could satisfy its literacy test. See Kealy, Hunting the dragon: Reforming the Massachusetts murder statute, 10 B. U. Pub. Int. L. J. 203, 205-206 (2001). Thus, it was not long before persons other than clerics claimed the exemption, so that the benefit of clergy exemption benefitted anyone who could read. See Justice Harlan's discussion in McGautha v. California, 402 U.S. 183, 197, 91 S.Ct. 1454, 28 L.Ed.2d 711 (1971), noting that although all criminal homicides were prima facie capital cases, the benefit of clergy was available to almost any man who could read. In response to the exemption's widespread availability, statutes were passed throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proclaiming the exemption unavailable for homicides committed under particularly reviled circumstances, collectively termed murder with malice aforethought. Moreland, The Law of Homicide (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1952), ch. 2, The Development of Malice Aforethought, p. 9. The benefit of clergy remained available, however, for offenders convicted of less culpable homicides. Id. Thereafter, unjustified and unexcused homicide was divided into two separate crimes: wilful murder of malice aforethought, a capital offense for which the benefit of clergy was unavailable, and manslaughter. Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (New York: The Lawyers Co Operative Pub. Co., 1927), ch. 2, The Felonies, pp. 395-396. The critical difference between murder and manslaughter was the presence or absence of malice aforethought. Moreland, supra at 10.
The phrase malice aforethought has evolved over the centuries. During the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, malice aforethought meant that one possessed an intent to kill well in advance of the act itself. Id. at 10. Notably, the emphasis was on aforethought, so that the critical difference between capital and noncapital murder was the passage of time between the initial formulation of the intent to kill and the act itself. Moylan, Criminal Homicide Law (Maryland Institute for Continuing Professional Education of Lawyers), ch. 2, § 2.7. The term malice alone had little significance beyond meaning an intent to commit an unjustified and inexcusable killing. Id. The purpose of the malice aforethought element was to distinguish between deliberate, calculated homicides and homicides committed in the heat of passion. Kealy, supra at 206. As more and more defendants claimed they lacked an intent to kill before the act was committed, juries and courts increasingly rejected this argument. The result was a case-by-case semantic erosion of the term aforethought, until malice aforethought meant nothing more than the intent to kill had to exist at the time the act was committed. Perkins & Boyce, Criminal Law (3rd ed.), Murder, § 1, p. 58 ([a]s case after case came before the courts for determination ... there came to be less and less emphasis upon the notion of a well-laid plan. And at the present day, the only requirement in this regard is that it must not be an after thought). There was, consequently, a parallel erosion of the distinction between capital murder, for which aforethought was required, and noncapital homicide, for which it was not. Interestingly, although the English courts grew weary of the oft abused lack of aforethought defense, it was nevertheless evident that there was still some interest in distinguishing between a homicide committed in cold-blood and one committed under circumstances that mitigated one's culpability. To express this distinction, the focus shifted from aforethought to malice. Moreland, supra at 11 ([t]he law of homicide seems thus to have now progressed from a place where the mental element was of no importance to a place where at the beginning of the seventeenth century it had become a factor of prime importance). Because there was a need to distinguish the most serious homicide from the rest, and because aforethought no longer had legal significance, malice evolved from being merely an intent to kill to also evidencing the absence of mitigating circumstances. Moylan, supra at § 2.7. Consequently, the presence of malice became both synonymous with the absence of mitigating circumstances and the sole element distinguishing murder from manslaughter. We glean from our examination of manslaughter's historical development that manslaughter is defined to reflect the absence of malice. Thus, the only element distinguishing murder from manslaughter is malice.