More on murder

Murder is, at heart, a very simple crime. If you kill someone, having had the intention to kill them, or at least to injure them, then you have committed the crime of murder. There is only one complete defence to murder - that the killing was an act of self-defence. And that is a fair state of affairs.

However, the philosophy of murder is far more complicated. Although that definition looks clearcut and straightforward, it is easy to lay out circumstances that provide a stratum of culpability. I'll start off with an historic case, that of R v Dudley and Stephens. It's about as fun and interesting as law school precedents get, involving as it does shipwreck, murder and cannibalism. Briefly, the yacht Mignonette was struck by a wave and sank in the Atlantic Ocean, her three crew, Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks and Richard Parker, the cabin boy escaping onto the lifeboat, without any fresh water.

After two and a half weeks with hardly any food and less water, Parker sank into a coma, and Dudley and Stephens decided that, in order for them to live, they would have to eat Parker. Which, basically, they did. 24 days after they were wrecked, a sail was sighted and they were rescued. Had they not killed Parker, there is no doubt that they would have died. On return to London, they were tried for the murder of Richard Parker. They were convicted of murder; rightly, because the defence they tried - that the murder of Parker was necessity - is no defence to murder.

Dudley and Stephens are perfect examples that though the crime of murder is definable and straightforward, the culpability of the act can vary. However, such is the moral force of murder that the judiciary have extremely limited room to manoeuvre with regard to sentencing - there is now a statutory life sentence, and there was then a statutory death penalty for murder. It is for this reason that the growth in partial-defence manslaughter cases has been so rapid.

The two partial defences of provocation and diminished responsibility are pretty well summed-up by Julie Bindel here as "men lose their tempers; women lose their marbles", for that is the way in which they are predominantly used. Men see red and lash out, while women slowly build up years of resentment and then slip their husband strychnine in the soup, or stab him while he sleeps. However, the idea that women must have gone temporarily insane to commit the murder has grated with feminists for a long time - they aren't mad at all, they have just been provoked beyond endurance.

The law is being changed, in effect, to make it harder for men to claim provocation, and easier for women to claim 'partial self-defence'. It is being made much less 'acceptable' to kill in anger, and more acceptable to 'kill in fear'. Bindel justifies it thus:

These reforms, although a long time coming, are along the right lines. It is wrong to kill out of jealously, or because someone insults you. This is not serious provocation, nor should it be an excuse for murder. Whereas battered women are often trapped in their situation, with nowhere to run, the victims of "nagging" and infidelity can simply leave the relationship, without the fear of being tracked down and killed.

The principle behind both defences at present is that the murder was not done deliberately - the murderer was temporarily 'not in his right mind'. The principle is that a deliberate, pre-meditated murder, done with full knowledge of one's actions is not excusable. This is surely right. For what it is worth, the defence of provocation has been grossly abused in the past, as has the defence of diminished responsibility. There is little doubt that any new defence of partial self-defence will also be abused.

The reason they are so abused is summed up (accidentally) again by Bindel:

Why should women, such as the late Emma Humphreys, the victim of horrendous abuse by the man she killed, be labelled a murderer? Emma once told me that the stigma was almost as bad as the life sentence that came with it.

Well, she should be labelled a murderer because she deliberately killed somebody. The law, which is a reflection in this instance of the values of our society over hundreds of years, has laid down that the deliberate killing of a person is only justifiable in one circumstance - where that individual was at the moment he was killed posing an immediate threat to the life of the killer. Any other circumstances are murder. It is that simple.

Hence the defences seek to prove that the killing was not properly deliberate as the killer was temporarily not in right mind.

Partial defences seek to blur the moral clarity of the law of murder. Each defence is a legalistic fiction. The serial killer claiming insanity is bad as well as mad; the drunkard claiming provocation may have been provoked, but he deliberately chose to fight; the battered wife claiming diminished responsibility may have been abused, but she wasn't crazy when she picked up the carving knife. All are (in my scenario) in reality guilty of murder. The partial defences tamper with the offence, when they are better used to determine the punishment.

A judge should decide the sentence after the jury decide the facts. A lifetime spent cowering from a misogynistic bully should be a mitigating factor in your killing of him. Each case of murder will have different circumstances - sentences should be tailored to fit. In Dudley and Stephens, the two were sentenced to six months imprisonment. They were murderers, but the facts of the case were such that the standard penalty was simply not appropriate.

On that...

Further to my last post, I've noticed a few stories like this one recently.

A 20-year-old woman who was attacked by a gang of youths in a park in Lancashire, has died in hospital. Sophie Lancaster and her 21-year-old boyfriend Robert Maltby were found with serious head injuries in Stubbylee park in Bacup, Rossendale, on 11 August. Mr Maltby was left in a coma with bleeding on his brain but has since made a recovery. Lancashire police have charged five teenage boys, aged between 15 and 17, with section 18 wounding.

For fuck's sake! These boys battered a 21 year old man into a coma, and killed his girlfriend. They beat her up until she died. There's a word for this, and a very ancient offence. What they did, if it fulfills the criteria for wounding - ie a deliberate attack - also fulfills the criteria for one count of murder and one count of attempted murder. If you attack someone, and they die as a result, that's murder - not manslaughter, not wounding: murder. Fucking Hell! There's a law, so bloody well apply it.

Precatory words

I don't know who killed Rhys Jones. But I do know this: no child in this country should be riding around on a BMX bike with a gun shooting other children.

Well, quite. But is this sort of thing from Cameron particularly helpful or enlightening? Can we learn anything useful from the death of an 11 year old in Liverpool? Probably not, to be honest. Looking back to the reactions to the death of Jamie Bulger two things stand out. The first is the shameless use of the crime for political advantage by the Labour Party, the second is that very little substantive changed as a result. Rhetoric on crime, anti-social behaviour and 'anarchy' has been ramped up, but policy has not. What, in practical terms, can a Government actually do to fight crime and restore/retain public order?

The public must not rely on the government to prevent gang culture, but take more responsibility itself, David Cameron has said.

Again, fine. There really is no such thing as society - if you want something done, you shouldn't just sit back and wait for 'them' to take care of it. We are them (grammar). If you want a return to a society where kids misbehaving were routinely upbraided by adults - then upbraid misbehaving children. They can't all have knives after all. And there's the nub - it is perceived that a critical mass of people are now armed, and perfectly happy to use extreme force in trivial circumstances. What should Cameron announce as Conservative policy on crime? How about this:

"The Labour Party have introduced 30 Criminal Justice Acts in 10 years, creating 3,000 new criminal offences. Their priority seems to have been to make law abiding citizens criminals and not the other way around. Their mania for intricate meddling has left a criminal justice system that is unnecessarily complicated and a police force that has had initiative drummed out of it. If you carry a knife, there are now at least five separate statutes under which you can be penalised. The police pursue children throwing sausages, but not those wielding knives.

"The Conservative Party favour simplicity over complication. The correct response to a law being broken is not to enact a new law, but properly to enforce the existing one. The correct answer to a neighbourhood that is descending into lawlessness is not to erect Close Circuit Television cameras to help police identify the perpetrators, but to re-instate a visible and regular police presence in order to deter them altogether. The hallmark, after all, of a successful police force is not how many crimes they detect, but how much crime they prevent.

"Whenever the Labour Party is faced with a problem they reach to targets as the solution. But if targets were a successful way of running anything, the Soviet Union would still be a world power, and Vladimir Putin wouldn't have to take his top off to get the world's attention. Targets are no more effective for the police than they have proved for the NHS.

"Simpler laws, properly enforced. A police force directed less by central Government and more accountable to local opinion. Simplicity and decentralisation: two things that this Labour Government has been so spectacularly poor at delivering over the past decade."