Homicide - Definition - Law Dictionary Home Dictionary Definition homicide

Definition :

Homicide, destroying the life of a human being. In its several stages of guilt, arising from the parti-cular circumstances of mitigation or aggravation which attends it, it is either justifiable, excusable, or felonious.

I. Justifiable, of three kinds:

(a) Where the proper officer executes a criminal in strict conformity with his sentence.

(b) Where an officer of justice, or other person acting in his aid, in the legal exercise of a particular duty, kills a person who resists or prevents him from executing it.

(g) Where it is committed in prevention of a forcible and atrocious crime, 1 Hale, 488.

II. Excusable, of two kinds:-

(a) Per infortunium, or by misadventure, as where a man doing a lawful act, without any intention of hurt, by accident kills another; but if death ensue from any unlawful act, the offence is manslaughter, and not misadventure.

(b) Se defendendo, as where a man kills another upon a sudden encounter in his own defence, or in the defence of his wife, child, parent, or servant, and not from any vindictive feeling.

III. Felonious, of two kinds:-

(a) Killing oneself. See SUICIDE.

(b) Killing another, which is either--

1) Murder (see that title); or

(2) Manslaughter (see that title); and this is either--

(a) Voluntary, where a man doing an unlawful act, not amounting to felony, by accident kills another; or

(b) Involuntary, where, upon a sudden quarrel, two persons fight, and one of them kills the other; or where a man greatly provokes another by some personal violence, etc., and the other immediately kills him. Consult Russell on Crimes.

The killing of one person by another, Black's Law Dictionary, 7th Edn., p. 739.