Homicide Act 1957

The Homicide Act 1957 marks a change in the book’s account of murder as both a legal category and a word with a longer history. It extended murder to include deaths resulting from an intention to cause grievous bodily harm, against a background in which the boundaries of the offence had already reached beyond a straightforward intention to kill.

Definition and Earlier Meanings

The legal definition presented in the book describes murder as the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought. The account sets that definition beside older meanings: in Old English, the word could describe strongly condemned homicide, but also great wickedness, deadly injury, or torment. More narrowly, it referred to secret murder, which Germanic custom treated as a crime, while open homicide was regarded as a private wrong to be answered by blood-revenge or compensation.

The older legal emphasis on secrecy appears in the account of Britton, who explained the Anglo-French term murdre as felonious homicide in which neither perpetrator nor victim was identified. The later requirement of malice aforethought did not, the book cautions, admit of a short, definitive summary in its modern interpretation. Murder therefore appears not as a fixed category handed down unchanged, but as a legal definition whose scope and conditions developed over time.

The Act and the Scope of Liability

Before the 1957 act, a person could be guilty of wilful murder without intending the victim’s death. The examples given include death caused by an unlawful act that the perpetrator knew was likely to kill someone, and injuries inflicted to facilitate the commission of certain offences. These examples show how liability could extend beyond an explicit purpose to cause death.

The act extended murder to include death resulting from an intention to cause grievous bodily harm. In the account, this change broadens the relevant intention: the intended harm need not itself be death for a resulting death to fall within the definition of murder. The rule thus occupies a consequential position in the book’s history of the offence, connecting legal responsibility to both the intended injury and the death that follows.

Conditions and Jurisdictional Differences

The book states that the perpetrator must be of sound mind for the offence to constitute murder. It also gives a time limit for the result: in England, death must ensue within a year and a day after the act presumed to have caused it. The account explicitly distinguishes Scotland, where that requirement does not apply.

It also contrasts the treatment of degrees of murder across jurisdictions. British law recognizes no degrees of guilt in murder, whereas United States law distinguishes murder in the first degree, described as involving no mitigating circumstances, from murder in the second degree; the book notes that this distinction does not obtain in every state. Together, these qualifications place the 1957 change within a legal framework shaped not only by the definition of intent but also by rules about mental condition, timing, and jurisdiction.