Terence Morris

Louis Blom-Cooper

For more than three centuries the criminal law has given rise to a divergent set of approaches to the crime of homicide. Whereas the law of murder has not conceptually changed,the crime of manslaughter has resulted in some forms of homicide being visited with relatively minor penalties. These various categories of unlawful killing present considerable problems relating to intention, or lack of it, and the culpability of those whose behaviour, while lacking in evident malice, is characterised by the grossest recklessness. The reaction of the relatives of victims is generally simpler. They frequently find it impossible to understand how those who kill by dangerous or drunken driving may receive comparatively lenient sentences, while those convicted of manslaughter following a drunken brawl may be dealt with more severely, and yet others, convicted of so-called 'mercy killings', are subject to the mandatory penalty of life imprisonment. This book addresses the powerful and controversial arguments for the current distinctions between murder, manslaughter and other specific categories of crime to be abolished and subsumed within a single crime of culpable homicide. In the course of this analysis the authors consider a number of issues of great contemporary importance, including the presentation of expert evidence in cases involving unexplained infant death, corporate killing, and the question of the defences available to the accused, including self-defence and provocation, where popular notions of what is reasonable or justifiable may be at variance with legal precedent. While this book aims to consider criminal homicide in its social, historical and legal setting, it also goes far beyond in setting out the case for radical reform.

A Study of the Crime and Punishment for Homicide

With Malice Aforethought

Louis Jacques Blom-Cooper

Criminal Homicide in England Since 1957

A Calendar of Murder

This book is a powerful commentary on the law of murder (and other unlawful killings), as well as its history, modern-day development, wholesale deficiencies, and unjust penal consequences. Written by two of the UK's leading and most forthright commentators, the book examines what Lord Judge in his Foreword describes as 'trenchant views' on correcting two particular strands of deficiency: the present definition of murder and the penalty for that offense. It will be of importance to lawyers, academics, students, and others wishing to understand better these key issues at a time of change. It is a definitive account of the most serious offense in the criminal calendar, as well as the impact of the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment for murder on some 8,000 serving prisoners. At a time when the UK's Law Commission has suggested a division of murder into two categories - with manslaughter remaining, and a review of sentencing as a whole is imminent - the book focuses on earlier lamentable failures to deal with the problems of definition and sentencing which began with the UK's Homicide Act 1957 and were not addressed at the time of the abolition of capital punishment a decade later. Taking as a main focus the extraordinarily controversial decision of the House of Lords in the case of DPP v Smith (1960), the book contains fresh insights, based on a close study of that and the earlier case of R v Hedley and Jenkins (1945). The authors demonstrate how politics, law-making, judicial decision-making, and myth somehow became intertwined in a way that would now be unacceptable in a more transparent, rights conscious, and informed age.

Murder, Manslaughter and the Unlawful Taking of Human Life

Fine Lines and Distinctions

Pauline Morris

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

A Sociological Study of an English Prison

Pentonville

Terence Morris

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