Homicide

Legal Model

According to the legal model, homicides divide into those that are nonfelonious and those that are felonious. Nonfelonious homicides, furthermore, may be justifiable or excusable. Justifiable homicides are completely justified, as when a judge sentences a criminal to death or when a jailor carries out a death sentence. In contrast, a person committing an excusable homicide is at fault to some degree but not enough to have committed a felonious homicide.

There are two basic kinds of excusable homicides. First, misadventure occurs when there is death during the commission of an act, lawful or unlawful, where the slayer has no intent to hurt and there is no criminal negligence. Examples include the death of a person who runs in front of a moving automobile, whose driver is unable to avoid the collision, or the death of a person on the operating table during an extremely difficult operation with no fault of the surgeon. Second, excusable homicide involves death resulting from self-defense, where the slayer is not completely without fault. To illustrate, when a sudden brawl erupts, a person may kill another to protect herself.

Felonious homicides are criminal in nature. They include murder, where the killer commits the act with “malice aforethought,” and manslaughter, where there are mitigating circumstances, but not enough of them to make the killing justifiable or excusable homicide.

Motivational Model

Although the legal model varies in detail from country to country, it is necessary for national and local law enforcement authorities, especially judges, in meting out punishments. Motivational models, alternatively, are useful to homicide investigation teams. In the motivational model, homicides are classified according to the motive that animated the killer. This model helps the investigator to narrow the field of likely suspects. This classification developed in the United States in the 1980s with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. It is widely used all over the world today.

All homicides fall into four broad categories within the motivational model. First, criminal-enterprise homicides involve murder committed for material gain. Second, personal-cause homicides occur when murder is committed for a personal reason and ensues from interpersonal aggression. Third, sexual homicides involve a sexual element in the murder. Finally, group-cause homicides occur when two or more people, with a common ideology, sanction a murder, which one or more of the group's members then actually commits.

All four categories have subcategories. Criminalenterprise homicide has eight subcategories. A person who agrees to take the life of another for profit commits contract killing. A gang-motivated murder may involve the extortion and murder of a businessperson. Criminal competition occurs when a homicide results from intragroup or intergroup conflict and rivalry, usually over control of territory. Kidnap murder involves a kidnapping followed by murder if a victim or her family does not meet ransom demands. Product tampering involves a murderer who alters a product, usually a medicinal capsule, with intent to cause a person's death. To mask motives, the murderer may kill other innocent persons, such as Stella Nickel's 1986 lacing of her husband's Excedrin capsules with cyanide. Drug murder intends to eliminate an individual viewed as an obstruction (such as a judge or police officer) to illegal drug business. Insurance-motivated [Page 710]murder is killing a person to benefit from insurance or inheritance. Finally, felony murder occurs secondary to property crime, usually burglary or robbery.

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