Definitions of Homicide Victimization
• Analyze homicide victimization and the criminal justice system’s response.
Classifications of Homicide
The vast majority of homicides are reported to the police making it, of all of the crimes committed, one of the easiest to track. Reporting is often done by a victim’s family or other community members who discover the body, first responders coming to help victims, or when police respond to a crime scene.
Homicide is the illegal killing of a human. The fact that the law indicates that homicide is illegal means there are occasions where it is legal to kill someone, such as self-defense, war, as well as carrying out the death penalty. Illegal killings can range from manslaughter to murder, each with varying degrees of severity. The classification of a homicide depends on the intentions and whether it was premeditated. Premeditation means some level of planning occurred before the killing took place. Premeditated killing does not need to be focused on a particular victim; it just needs to show that there was a plan to kill. Note that attempted murders are classified under aggravated assaults, including aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
First-degree murder is the most common type of homicide. It is where there was both the intent to kill as well as some level of premeditation (FindLaw, n.d.). An example would be if someone got into a bar fight, left the bar, went to his car, got a gun, came back inside, and shot someone. Even though very little time lapsed between the fight and the killing, the fact that the person went and got a lethal weapon shows both premeditation and intent.
Second-degree murder is when there was an intention to kill but no premeditation (FindLaw, n.d.). It can be killing someone in the heat of the moment. An example would be if two people got into a fight and one cut the other with a bottle and the victim died. The intention to do serious harm was present because there was a weapon, but there was a lack of intention to kill. The nuanced difference between first- and second-degree murder depends on state laws, but it is generally agreed that the intersection of premeditation and intention distinguishes the two.
Manslaughter is the less serious charge against someone who has committed a homicide. Involuntary manslaughter is when there was no intention to kill but someone still died (FindLaw, n.d.). Involuntary manslaughter can include neglect of a child, elderly person, or disabled person. It can also include reckless behaviors
like drunk driving. Voluntary manslaughter is when there was intent to kill someone, but there was a reasonable provocation that would cause someone to “lose control.” One example is the honest but unreasonable use of lethal force for self-defense. The person might have felt that killing someone was reasonable at the time, but it is clear to everyone else that the killing was not justified.
Of the four types of homicide, voluntary manslaughter has the most court cases to help refine its definition. A number of cases have helped define what can be included in voluntary manslaughter. People v. Barry (1979) is a case in which the husband, Joseph Berry, killed his wife, Rachel Pessah, after she admitted to adultery. The killing occurred two weeks after her first admission of cheating, but during those two weeks, according to the case, she had taunted her husband while she continued to express sexual interest in him. The night of the murder, they fought, and Berry ended up strangling his wife with a phone cord. The legal angle for this being classified as voluntary manslaughter was that there had been a long period of provocation as well as the fight that led the killing to be “in the heat of the moment.” The courts overturned the first-degree murder to voluntary manslaughter.
Building on the Berry case, both People v. Chevalier (1989) and State v. Shane (1993) held that just telling someone about adultery was not sufficient provocation to justify killing. The cases held that there must be adequate provocation, meaning that the events that occurred would cause any reasonable person to “lose control,” leading to the killing. Opponents of this concept of adequate provocation point out that people are expected to control their behavior, even when they are angry, and that this can lead to blaming the murder victim for provoking someone to become so mad they commit murder. Adequate provocation is difficult to prove because often just the victim and the perpetrator are present; clearly the victim cannot present his or her side of the story (Roth & Blayen, 2012).
Statistics
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics on homicide do not include deaths caused by negligence, suicide, accident, or justifiable homicides. The FBI has a separate database for reporting justifiable homicides, which are the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty or killed by a citizen during the commission of a felony (FBI, 2016).
In 2016, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports data showed 17,250 murders in the United States, which is a slight increase since 2007. The vast majority of homicide victims were men (11,821), with black men accounting for 6,749 deaths and white men accounting for 4,665 deaths. There were 1,977 Latino victims and 389 Latina victims. Most homicide happens within race—blacks most often kill other blacks, and whites most often kill other whites.
This figure shows homicide victimization by race and sex. Black men have a much higher number of victimizations compared to white men, and men overall are more likely than women to be victims. Image: 2016 Homicide victims by Race and Sex. Source: Barnes & Noble Education. License: CC-BY NC SA
Guns are the most common weapon used in homicides; the vast majority of them are handguns. Weapons that were not guns accounted for 27 percent of all murder weapons. Compared to other countries with similar cultures, the United States has one of the highest rates of gun use during a homicide, with a gun death rate of 3.85 per 100,000 as compared to Canada, which has a rate of 0.48 per 100,000, Germany (0.12 per 100,000), and the United Kingdom (0.07 per 100,000) (Aizenman, 2017). The United States is ranked 31st in the world in terms of gun deaths.
Although the media often discuss the use of semiautomatic rifles, handguns, by far, are the most commonly used weapon in homicides. They are also the most commonly used gun in suicides. Image: Weapons used in Homicides. Source: Barnes & Noble Education. License: CC-BY NC SA