A Conviction for Murder in the UK - Essay Example

In the moral language of jurisprudence and Government, it tends to be represented as the most heinous of all crimes (indeed, the word 'heinous' seems to have been reserved especially to describe that one offence).

Murder, wrote the Law Commission, should 'be regarded as a special category of the act, requiring special treatment from the rest of the law of homicide'.Justice, the United Kingdom branch of the International Commission of Jurists, captured its extraordinary standing when it declared that murder 'has a unique place in the law of England not only because it is the most heinous crime in the criminal calendar but also because it is the most serious crime for which the sentence is fixed by law.'A number of lawyers and penal reformers hold that the law of homicide presents difficulties of application and consistency.

For example, a conviction for murder can ensue even when the killer intended only to injure his or her victim. The results of action cannot always be foreseen by the perpetrator, and the onus has been effectively placed on the jury to ascertain how probable it was that there would have been certain harm or death. The M'Naghten rules require psychiatrists and expert witnesses to testify in bad faith and within the framework of an antiquated theory of mind to which almost no one would now subscribe.

And, under the 'year and a day rule', the determination of the cause or causes of death can become ever more elusive as the gap lengthens between injury and death. Whether death is treated as murder may depend as much on the rapidity of the response of the emergency services, and the efficacy of medical techniques and skills, as on the killer's culpability or intentionality (after all, life-support machines can sustain a semblance of life for very long periods). Homicide is portrayed differently in the empirically-driven language of the scholar and practitioner.

Presenting their arguments as if they were a deliberate counterweight to the strong moral condemnation of murder as the most detestable of all crimes, and prompted by an undoubted antipathy to hanging and indeterminate sentences of imprisonment, British criminologists have tended to describe murder as statistically uncommon, socially contained, and morally equivocal, a mundane problem whose gravity has been somewhat overblown by popular and press misconceptions centred on the reporting of egregious cases.

Consider Terence Morris and Louis Blom-Cooper, two prominent scholars with an uncommon interest in homicide and the debate about capital punishment. Morris and Blom-Cooper wrote in 1964: 'Although murder is regarded as a serious crime in this country, it can hardly be said to be a serious social problem. . . . In this country murder is overwhelmingly a domestic crime in which men kill their wives, mistresses and children, and women kill their children.'