Opinion ID: 848794
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: homicide in english common law

Text: 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.