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This article presents some psychosocial and juridical aspects of voluntarymanslaughters that occurred in Costa Rica during the 1998-1999 period. The study isbased on guilty verdicts given by the justice courts. The outcomes indicate that thereare no significant differences between manslaughter and murder; fire weapons werethe main way for committing murder; nearly one in four offenders had a criminalrecord, and in two thirds of the cases, the victim and the offender knew each other. Este artículo presenta algunas características jurídico-penales y psicosociales de loshomicidios dolosos ocurridos en Costa Rica durante 1998 y 1999, con base en el estudio de las sentencias condenatorias que emitieron los tribunales de justicia. Se destacaque no se hallaron diferencias apreciables entre la ocurrencia de homicidios simples ycalificados, el arma de fuego fue el principal medio utilizado para matar, alrededor deuna cuarta parte de los homicidas tenían antecedentes penales y en dos terceras partesde los casos existían vínculos de conocimiento entre víctima y victimario.

In October 2010, section 55(3) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 came into force, and ‘fear of serious violence’ was expressly included in the statute as a qualifying trigger for ‘loss of self-control’ voluntary manslaughter, a partial defence to murder. This development (albeit that it is a gender-neutral provision) was anticipated to be an important step in recognising the situation of a woman who, in fearing a partner’s violence, control and abuse, kills to preserve her own life. The provision is only operative where ‘fear of serious violence’ and ‘loss of self-control’ can be established, which, given its limitations, prohibits many women in fear of a partner’s violence and coercion from successfully using this defence. The author’s review of the legal reform and the case law, together with 40 homicide cases involving female defendants who killed intimate current or former partners (April 2011–March 2016) demonstrates that this defence, which promised to deliver justice for abused women, has been little used. Women’s vulnerability and fear and response to intimate partner abuse and control is still insufficiently understood and explored and is evident where juries return murder rather than manslaughter verdicts. Further reform is needed to the legal framework regarding this and other defences in order to achieve a just law by incorporating women’s experience of, and defensive response to, violence and control in its many forms.

The Eighth Amendment's “narrowing” requirement for capital punishment eligibility has challenged states since it was recognized in Furman v. Georgia in 1972. This article examines whether California's death penalty scheme complies with this requirement by empirically analyzing 27,453 California convictions for first‐degree murder, second‐degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter with offense dates between January 1978 and June 2002. Using a 1,900‐case sample, we examine whether California's death penalty statute fails to comply with the Eighth Amendment's narrowing test. Our findings support two conclusions. First, the death‐eligibility rate among California homicide cases is the highest in the nation during that period and in the ensuing decade. We find that 95 percent of all first‐degree murder convictions and 59 percent of all second‐degree murder and voluntary manslaughter convictions were death eligible under California's 2008 statute. Second, a death sentence is imposed in only a small fraction of the death‐eligible cases. The California death sentencing rate of 4.3 percent among all death‐eligible cases is among the lowest in the nation and over two‐thirds lower than the death‐sentencing rate in pre‐Furman Georgia.

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link This article reflects on the adoption of s. 76 Serious Crime Act 2015 which criminalises coercive or controlling behaviour in an intimate or family relationship. The examination draws upon the legislative effort to recognise both the variety of tactics and behaviours used by a perpetrator and the psychological harm that the survivor experiences. It explores the power dynamics in relationships characterised by coercive control and questions whether the law itself does enough to address the imbalance of power between the perpetrator and the survivor. In line with the theme of this special edition the article also draws out aspects where vulnerability can be increased for some adult victims when coercive and controlling behaviour intersects with other characteristics. Moving from the offence, the article then considers an argument for aligning partial defences to murder with it. It takes inspiration from the case of Sally Challen, granted leave to appeal her murder conviction at the Court of Appeal on 1st March 2018. Leave was granted after her lawyers successfully persuaded the court that the introduction of s. 76 Serious Crime Act 2015 amounted to fresh evidence in her defence that was unavailable at the time of her trial in 2011. Lady Justice Rafferty stated that, “It should be plainly understood that the application made today is but one step in what, it is hoped by counsel, those who instruct her and many others concerned in this case, will be a full detailed exploration of the position, based on scholarship, learning and clinical expertise, which should prevail now… A jury, it is argued, should, with the benefit of that learning, be enabled to reach a clear settled conclusion on the basis of an understanding which, it is said, was not available to the jury in 2011.” The arguments at her appeal will seek to reduce her murder conviction to manslaughter, providing an opportunity for this article to explore the complexities of aligning the partial defences to murder with the offence of coercive or controlling behaviour.

The revolution of the partial defences to murder by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 may have had a catastrophic impact on cases of mercy killing.1 While previously shoehorned into the diminished responsibility plea, the medicalisation of this defence may prevent such a ploy. However, a recent case has offered insight into the circumstances which may still result in a manslaughter conviction for mercy killers through a new avenue previously thought impermissible. This article will discuss the case and those similar, alongside charging decisions and just results. Mercy killing remains a grey area in the criminal justice system, but is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Introduction Erotic asphyxiation is a sexual phenomenon in which one partner reduces the other person's brain oxygen level through strangulation. This study analyzes deaths caused by sexually-motivated strangulation to cases of homicidal choking — summarizing criminal penalties for defendants, depending on the presence of drugs, or alcohol intoxication. Methods The mode of analysis involves three sources of data. First, a retrospective chart review of our clinics' two recent cases. Second, a meta-analysis of these materials in relationship to forensic reports obtained from prosecutor's office. Third, we examine the prevalence of death due to strangulation in erotic and non-erotic cases using central court database. Lastly, we provide the summary of interviews involving the country's only forensic unit, which investigates criminal cases involving voluntary and involuntary strangulation. Results In total, we analyzed 15 cases of sexual asphyxiation — 2 of our own; 5 reported in prosecutor's archives; 8 control cases ruled as a non-sexual homicide. The two of our clinical cases describe two victims of voluntary erotic asphyxiation, involving complex sexual environment in which a sexual partner accidentally strangulated the other one during sex. The first case describes a 30 years-old female, who required all of her past sexual partners to choke her with hands in order to reach orgasm. The second case is that of a 41 years-old homosexual male, who was still a novice to kinky play and succumbed to death as a result of being tied with a set of ropes around his neck and body. By combining findings from the analysis of our clinic's cases with 5 files obtained from prosecutor's office — we are able to compare results of these cases to controls (involving homicidal suffocation using the plastic bag). In our cases, the defendants who avoid serving prison time for strangulating in course of erotic play typically exhibit these characteristics — at the time of the killing, they were not under influence of drugs; the deceased had documented (based on witness interview, review of personal items, or medical documentation) long-standing paraphilic disorder. In controls, the likelihood of being convicted of voluntary manslaughter was lower for people who acted under the influence of drugs but higher for those under the influence of alcohol. Conclusions These findings show that documented presence of paraphilic tendencies in the deceased might serve as grounds for not sentencing their sex partners for prison time if they acted to satisfy someone else's kinky needs.

This article examines the operation of the reformed English diminished responsibility plea in mercy killer cases. In particular, it makes three claims. First, it predicts that—like its predecessor—the revised doctrine will be stretched, where necessary, to accommodate these offenders. This is because (i) normative arguments remain for convicting them of manslaughter instead of murder and (ii) other partial defence routes will usually be unavailable. Secondly, it contends that such pragmatism will now be facilitated by a disconnect between (i) the defence’s post-reform narrowing and (ii) its ongoing interpretive flexibility. Thirdly, given that disconnect, it suggests that this pragmatism will be problematic. Notably, it will (i) compromise the plea’s newfound coherence and (ii) exacerbate unfair labelling of mercy killers. Ultimately, and more broadly, these difficulties reinforce recent calls for further homicide law reform.

Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. Questions, diagrams, and exercises help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress. This chapter explores the elements of murder and the partial defences which reduce a defendant’s liability to voluntary manslaughter. Murder is a common law offence that is committed when a defendant unlawfully causes the death of a person with an intention to kill or cause grievous bodily harm (GBH). Where a defendant has both the actus reus and mens rea for murder, but also has one of three special, partial defences available to him, his liability for murder is reduced to that of manslaughter (voluntary manslaughter). Loss of control, diminished responsibility, suicide pact, and infanticide are also discussed.

Manslaughter is defined by common law as any unlawful homicide that is not murder. The offence is limited by murder at one extreme and accidental killing at the other. Manslaughter can be either ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary’. This chapter deals with voluntary manslaughter: this occurs when someone had the intention to kill or do grievous bodily harm, but relies on a partial defence to murder. The two partial defences considered in this chapter are loss of self- control and diminished responsibility (suicide pact is dealt with in Ch 15). This chapter scrutinizes the defences available to the accused and in particular the developing case law under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 on loss of control and diminished responsibility, including the Supreme Court’s decision in Golds and the series of Court of Appeal cases since that decision.

Case note on R v Jewell [2014] EWCA Crim 414; R v Workman [2014] EWCA Crim 575; and R v Barnsdale-Quean [2014] EWCA Crim 1418

Psychological research has long found that anger may lead to aggression, sometimes even fatal one. The provocation doctrine corresponds to this finding by providing that murder charges may be mitigated to voluntary manslaughter if evidence establishes that the defendant acted under the influence of a “sudden heat of passion”, resulting from “adequate provocation”. The modern rationale underlying provocation doctrine rests on the idea that defendant’s intense emotion of anger had resulted in loss of self-control, therefore he or she ought to be partially excused. Case law demonstrates that defendants sometimes kill out of fear of serious physical violence threatened by the deceased. For example, victims of long-term physical abuse by the deceased may kill their abusers out of fear of future violence, even if at the moment of the killing the deceased was not posing an imminent threat to life. In circumstances where defendants are unable to satisfy the requirements of self-defense, provocation might be the only viable defense that would mitigate a murder conviction to voluntary manslaughter. Yet, existing provocation doctrine is unfit to capture the distinct features characterizing the reaction of fearful defendants. Commonly perceived as an anger-centric defense, the defense’s elements mostly accommodate typical the responses of defendants who acted quickly, immediately following a single and sudden triggering incident, before any lapse of time allowed them to regain control. The article offers three major contributions to challenge existing view of provocation: first, it considers psychological research that had found that fear, similarly to anger, may also significantly interfere with individuals’ decision-making processes by disturbing rational judgement, therefore sometimes leading to lethal aggression. Second, drawing on this research, the article’s key argument is that provocation doctrine should be reconstructed to also include a fear-based prong. Third, recognizing fear-based provocation calls for rejecting the “anger-loss of control” paradigm that currently dominates judges and jurors’ perception of the defense. In its place, the article advocates an alternative framework that would focus on the fearful defendant’s fear of violence threatened by the victim that caused a significant impairment in the defendant’s thought processes, resulting in obscured judgment and reasoning. The reconstructed defense would also include an objective component, under which, the defendant would have to prove that a person of ordinary disposition would also experience such emotion and respond rashly without exercising reason and judgment.

In a criminal case, the judge’s decision making often involves proving, beyond any reasonable doubt, the defendant’s intention to commit a crime from material vidence. A valid decision should be supported by some material evidence, and neither the material evidence itself nor the support that it gives to the conclusion should be invalidated by any other material evidence. Luckily, this sounds a familiar topic in abstract argumentation with supports. We describe an argumentation theory, which roughly corresponds to the tradition of evidential support, but which provides a meta-argumentation (or extended argumentation) framework where an argument can attack/support other argumentation components. We model our example of intention-to-kill in the theory.

This article provides an analysis of the extent to which acute intoxication may or may not satisfy the ‘recognised medical condition’ requirement under s. 2 of the Homicide Act 1957, as amended by s. 52 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009. It is argued that jurisprudential authorities clarifying the parameters of the ‘recognised medical condition’ requirement are urgently needed. In the interim period the importation of the novel terminology remains open to conjecture. The author argues that ‘acute intoxication’ potentially satisfies the revised plea and utilises the position adopted in Scotland, New South Wales and New Zealand to demonstrate this proposition. The latter jurisdiction has never had a formal diminished responsibility plea, although it has been identified that evidence of a defendant's mental abnormality was often used to reduce a murder conviction to one of voluntary manslaughter via the legal conduit of provocation. Following the demise of the provocation defence, however, issues pertaining to provocative conduct and/or a defendant's mental abnormality fall to be considered by the sentencing judge, but only in restricted circumstances. The recent implementation of a tripartite sentencing regime in New Zealand means that the alcohol-dependent and/or provoked defendant who kills will not have such mitigation considered if they have previously committed a qualifying offence under the scheme. The position in New Zealand is set against the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill 2010–11 which proposes a ‘two-strike’ system for a variety of offences including voluntary manslaughter. It is submitted that this type of scheme has potentially significant consequences for the alcohol-dependent defendant who may not have had appropriate treatment for his mental abnormality following a first conviction.

Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter of a police officer (Oakland, CA) in September 1968. He was sentenced to 2 to 15 years in prison. For 22 months, he was incarcerated at California Men’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, CA under “lock-up”—a system which gave him very limited interaction with the general prison population. During this time, Newton had no direct contact with members or leaders of the Black Panther Party. Furthermore, he was restricted to ten persons on his visiting list, nine of whom had to be members of his immediate family. The author of this paper was the tenth person on Newton’s visiting list. For the entire period of his incarceration, I visited with Newton almost every Friday from 9:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Following each visit, I would record a detailed memoir of our discussions, the general circumstances in the prison, and my reflections on everything that had transpired. This paper discusses the 22 months Huey P. Newton was in California Men’s Colony. It describes how we organized our sessions so the conversations would be of value to him during the following week. It also includes a description of some of the major ideas we shared, including how Newton developed some of his decisions about the Black Panther Party as well as his personal life. Finally, the paper includes my own observations about Newton and how he managed his life as an inmate “lock-up” in a maximum security prison. Newton was released in August 1970 following the reversal of his conviction by the California Appellate Court. He died in 1989. He was 47 years old.

In Italy, a judge reduced the sentence of a defendant by 1 year in response to evidence for a genetic predisposition to violence. The best characterized of these genetic differences, those in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), were cited as especially relevant. Several months previously in the USA, MAOA data contributed to a jury reducing charges from 1st degree murder (a capital offence) to voluntary manslaughter. Is there a rational basis for this type of use of MAOA evidence in criminal court? This paper will review in context recent work on the MAOA gene–environment interaction in predisposing individuals to violence and address the relevance of such findings to murder trials. Interestingly, the MAOA genetic variants impact future violence and aggression only when combined with the adverse environmental stimuli of childhood maltreatment. Thus nature and nurture interact to determine the individual’s risk. Based on current evidence, I argue there is a weak case for mitigation. But should future experiments confirm the hypothesis that individual differences in impulse control and response to provocation found in MAOA-L men (without abuse) are significantly magnified when combined with childhood maltreatment, the case could turn into a stronger one.

The legal nature of the offence of voluntary manslaughter committed under the circumstance of driving a vehicle while intoxicated, exceeding the legal limit, regulated by two legal procedures, generates forming and affirming two divergent points of view, in what concerns its legal classification. Therefore, certain authors, in doctrine, and other courts, in practice, appreciate that in such cases, the deeds constitute one single complex offence, stipulated in art. 178 para. 3 Criminal Code, which absorbs the one stipulated in art. 87 para. 1 Government Emergency Order (G.E.O.) no. 195/2002, regarding road traffic. On the contrary, other courts consider that in such cases, the deeds constitute two distinct offences, in a real concurrence. In such circumstances, legal courts actually do not have a unitary point of view regarding the legal classification of the mentioned deed, and the situation given becomes the subject of a recourse in the interest of law, the Supreme Court establishing that in this case it shall be retained one single complex offence of voluntary manslaughter stipulated in art. 178 para. 3 thesis I Criminal Code in which it is absorbed the offence stipulated in art. 87 para. 1 G.E.O. no. 195/2002. Yet, even on the purpose of a correct interpretation and application of the legal provisions and on the unification of the legal practice, the Supreme Court has decided the legal classification of the deed mentioned, there still exist injustices and discordances. Therefore, by analyzing the conditions of application of the legal provisions, my scientific research aims at bringing into light the repercussions at the level of legal practice of concurrent regulations in the situation mentioned and the necessity of the lawmaker’s intervention on the purpose of the correct interpretation and application of legal provisions.

Criminal law commonly requires judges and juries to decide whether defendants acted “reasonably.” Nevertheless, issues of reasonableness fall into two distinct categories: (1) where reasonableness concerns events and states, including risks of which an actor is conscious, that can be justly assessed without regard to the actor’s individual traits, and (2) where reasonableness concerns culpable mental states and emotions that cannot justly be assessed without reference to the actor’s capacities. This distinction is significant because, while the “reasonable person” by which category-1 cases are assessed is a disembodied and impersonal ideal that consists of nothing but the uncompromising values of the jurisdiction, the reasonable person by which category-2 cases are measured must necessarily incorporate some of an actor’s individual traits or risk blaming the blameless. Courts and commentators have thus far approached the task of individualizing or subjectivizing reasonableness in category 2 by trying to determine in advance which individual traits are generally relevant and which are not. I propose an alternative approach that, in addition to applying to negligence and voluntary manslaughter cases alike, derives its content from the social practice of blaming. I propose that a reasonable person in category-2 cases consists of every physical, psychological, and emotional trait an actor possesses, with one exception—the exception being that he possesses proper respect for the values of the people of the state as reflected and incorporated in the statute at hand.

The doctrine of voluntary manslaughter mitigates a defendant's crime and punishment when the defendant kills in the “heat of passion” generated by an extremely provoking event, such as witnessing a spouse's adultery. The doctrine relies on empirical assumptions about the effects of emotion, especially anger, on decision-making, and about the time course of emotion. Modern psychology research questions at least some of these assumptions, but the law adheres to its traditional approach. The law's resistance to change may stem partly from its dependency on language and analogic reasoning; the words we use to describe emotions like anger, revenge, and fear may shape people's perceptions concerning these emotions and thus may constrain the law's ability to respond to new psychological insights about emotion. At the same time, the law must serve normative goals that transcend the quest for empirical knowledge. For this reason and others, psychology can only inform the law, but cannot force changes in the law. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In daily life and in courtrooms, people regularly analyze the minds of others to understand intentions. Specifically, the detection of intentions behind prior events is one of the main issues dealt with in courtrooms. To our knowledge, there are no experimental works focused on the use of memory detection techniques to detect past intentions. This study aims at investigating whether reaction times (RTs) could be used for this purpose, by evaluating the accuracy of the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT) in the detection of past intentions. Sixty healthy volunteers took part in the experiment (mean age: 36.5 y; range: 18–55; 30 males). Participants were asked to recall and report information about a meeting with a person that had occurred at least one month before. Half of the participants were required to report about an intentional meeting, whereas the other half reported on a chance meeting. Based on the conveyed information, participants performed a tailored aIAT in which they had to categorize real reported information contrasted with counterfeit information. Results demonstrated that RTs can be a useful measure for the detection of past intentions and that aIAT can detect real past intentions with an accuracy of 95%.

"Can we all get along?" asked Rodney King during the Los Angeles civil disturbance in April 1992. This essay attempts to shed light on interracial conflicts by focusing on (mis)in-terpretations in the legal and cultural realms. I would like to re-visit one event preceding the urban unrest by discussing "The Court Interpreter," a short story by Ty Pak, a Korean immigrant writer, alongside the legal scholarship surrounding the uprising. The story is a fictionalized version of the trial of Soon Ja Du, the Korean liquor storekeeper who killed fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins, an African American. Harlins, suspected of walking away with a gallon of orange juice, attacked Du when the latter confronted her; the teenager was shot dead by the Korean woman. The incident took place only thirteen days after the beating of Rodney King by four white LAPD officers. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to "probation with prison time suspended, a small fine [$500], and a requirement of community service" (Gotanda 379). The court ruling incensed the already wounded and antagonized African American community, and "Latasha Harlins soon became virtually synonymous with the 'black-Korean conflict'" (Lie & Abelmann 75). Pak adheres quite closely to these events. He, of course, changes the names of all the principals: Soon Ja Du becomes Moonja Joo and Latasha Harlins becomes Natasha Brook. Furthermore, because "The Court Interpreter" is presented from a limited first-person point of view, the narrator's perceptions must be distinguished from those of the author. There are times, however, when these two perspectives do conflate, as will be shown. The narrative is recounted by the title character, who has been asked to interpret for the Korean proprietor by her defense lawyer. The narrator deplores the shooting of the black teenager, but bristles at the way the national media and the African American press lump all Korean Americans together as abhorrent. He therefore decides to do his best to help the defendant during her trial by making her sound educated and eloquent; later, he believes his superb performance as court interpreter accounts for the lenient sentence received by his client. The fictional trial--as was Soon Ja Du's trial--is followed in the narrative by the controversial police-brutality trial in Simi Valley, with the not-guilty verdicts and the initial acquittal of the four white police officers accused of beating Rodney King, and by the ensuing eruption that ravages Los Angeles. Countless businesses are looted and burned, and the narrator's brother-in-law is killed while guarding a store during the uprising. (1) I find "The Court Interpreter" both illuminating and troubling, especially in its depiction of the tension between blacks and Koreans. The story magnifies the various obstacles to sound judgment, most notably with regard to people of color, and reveals traces of what legal scholar Lisa Ikemoto describes as the "master narrative": "white supremacy's prescriptive, conflict-constructing power, which deploys exclusionary concepts of race and privilege in ways that maintain intergroup conflict" (1582). (2) I would like to extract from Pak's narrative several issues of both legal justice and quotidian judgments made in a pluralistic society. How can we--as readers, viewers, or jurors--exercise judicious judgment amid media distortions and racial stereotypes? How can we avoid the burden of representation and knee-jerk identity politics? How can we avoid unfairly judging or being judged on account of skin color, gender, class, or language? How do we negotiate the subjective assessments that occur in the courtroom (and in the narrative) at every level--from the court interpreter, to the witnesses, to the attorneys, to the judge? Above all, how can we extricate ourselves from the ideological web of the master narrative? As the narrator's court interpretation makes all too clear, what passes for objective description is invariably subjective construal. …

How do you tell people to get together, to forgive and forget, if the judge doesn't show any concern for the community? Justice includes punishment, and there was none in this case. (1) It was midafternoon on a warm day in late April 1992, when the nation and the world turned its attention to Los Angeles. For the next five days, they watched in horror as thousands of residents took to the streets to burn and loot, sometimes even to assault and kill. "No justice, no peace!" was the anthem of the day as local blacks, Latinos, and even a sprinkling of Asian Americans and whites joined in the five-day "rebellion" that purportedly underscored the injustice of the first verdict in the Rodney King police brutality trial. But for many who actively joined in the rebellion, and for the thousands who stayed at home, but understood all too well why others acted, Rodney King was not the symbol of injustice that was being protested; Latasha Harlins was. (2) On 16 March 1991, at approximately 9:35 A.M., Latasha Harlins walked into the Empire Liquor Market located at 9172 South Figueroa Street in Compton, California. Within the course of five short minutes, she lay on the floor in front of the store's counter, suffering from a single close-range gunshot wound to the back of her head. Two dollars lay crumpled in her left hand. Soon Ja Du, her face beginning to swell and discolor from the four punches Harlins landed during a brief struggle between the two, ostensibly over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, crouched on top of the counter trying to see where Harlins had fallen. Two neighborhood children ran terrified from the store. (3) Blood still had not started to seep from Harlins's motionless body when Billy Du, who had been asleep in his van outside the market, rushed inside. Soon Ja Du was hysterical, screaming that she was being robbed, that the robber had tried to take money out of the cash register. She then seemed to lapse into a coma. Seeing his bruised wife to his right and Harlins's body with the money to his left, he made a desperate call to the police department. "'We got a hold up," he told a 911 operator. The thief was "'taking the money out of the cash register" and his wife"' shot the robber lady." (4) Eight months later, Soon Ja Du, convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of Latasha Harlins, sat in a small, packed courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. The change of venue for the case from Compton to downtown Los Angeles purportedly gave the advantage of a secure courtroom: bullet-proof glass shielded the defendant, judge, and lawyers from anguished and angry spectators alike, all demanding some kind of justice. Judge Joyce A. Karlin heard defense and prosecution statements as she waited to deliver her sentence in a criminal trial by jury, the first sentence that she would render in a jury trial since she had taken the bench a few months earlier. (5) This is the story of a young African American female, Latasha Harlins, at two important urban sites: a small liquor/convenience store in her neighborhood and a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles. It also is the story of her interactions with two women: Soon Ja Du, a middle-aged, naturalized Korean American shopkeeper's wife, and Joyce Karlin, a relatively young, quite affluent European American judge. Their "diversity," manifest by their different racial, class, and generational affiliations and identities evoke the "female side" to the U.S.'s fundamentally conflicted relationship with "others." There were profound differences, but there were also some important similarities. Perhaps the most important similarities were that all three were females; that they were all migrants to Los Angeles; and that each came as part of a family that had great hope for what they could accomplish in this vibrant "urban frontier." Their similarities, however, did not outweigh their differences, and the impact that these differences had on the manner in which they regarded one another and chose to interact. …

In June of 2009, Michael Jackson died following a cardiac arrest. Jackson suffered from severe insomnia and anxiety, and Dr. Conrad Murray, a physician hired to look after Jackson’s medical needs during preparations for a major world tour, had apparently undertaken to treat Jackson’s insomnia in his home using a drug with known deadly potential: propofol. This is not a pediatric case, nor is it even typical in cases of medical negligence. But the Michael Jackson case illustrates many issues concerning legal standards with regard to negligence when it results in a patient death and practice standards with regard to sedation, professionalism, and the ethical obligations of physicians. In this chapter, we will undertake to discuss the Jackson case from both legal and professional perspectives, and then to compare elements of the Jackson case with that of another case of sedation that also ended in patient death, but not in criminal charges of homicide.

George Tiller was a Kansas abortionist who specialized in late-term abortions, which are legal under Kansas law only under special circumstances. Scott Roeder killed him, and on trial for murder, wished to plead that he was defending third persons against imminent and unlawful death at the hands of Tiller. He was prepared to present evidence to that effect to the jury, but the trial judge blocked both the plea and the evidence. If the evidence were persuasive, the jury could either have acquitted Roeder altogether, if they decided that his belief that he was defending third persons was reasonable, or convicted him just of voluntary manslaughter, if they decided he had a sincere but unreasonable belief. Since the blocked plea and evidence were Roeder’s only defenses, he was convicted of murder. He appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court, which had it oral argument on January 29, 2014. This paper discusses the oral argument.

When a heterosexual man is charged with murdering a transgender woman with whom he has been sexually intimate, an increasingly common defense strategy is to assert what has been called the trans panic defense. The defendant claiming trans panic will say that his discovery that the victim was biologically male (when he thought the victim was biologically female) provoked him into a heat of passion and caused him to lose his self-control. If the jury finds that the defendant was actually and reasonably provoked, it can acquit him of murder and find him guilty of the lesser offense of voluntary manslaughter. Claims of trans panic are troubling because they appeal to stereotypes about transgender individuals as sexually deviant, abnormal people. In August of 2013, the American Bar Association passed a resolution to limit the use of gay panic and trans panic arguments. In the attached article, which is approximately 23,000 words, including footnotes, Cynthia Lee and Peter Kwan examine the cultural structures of masculinity that may lead a man to kill a transgender woman with whom he has been sexually intimate. Building on Professor Angela Harris’ important work on male-on-male violence, we argue that violence by men against transgender women is a type of gender violence that has not received the attention it deserves. We use masculinities theories to unpack the possible motivations behind the claim of trans panic. We also discuss how structures of heteronormativity and masculinity as well as the doctrine of provocation itself can encourage the jury to find that the defendant who claims trans panic was reasonably provoked. We argue that in addition to educating jurors about the discrimination and violence faced by transgender individuals because of their chosen gender identity, prosecutors should educate jurors about the structures of masculinity that make trans panic arguments appealing. We also argue that the current understanding of reasonableness in provocation doctrine — reasonableness as that which is typical — is misguided. We suggest reasonableness is better understood as a normative limitation on the provocation defense. Accordingly, the jury should assess not just whether the average man in the defendant’s shoes would have been provoked but also whether it was normatively appropriate for the defendant to be so provoked.

Manslaughter is a common law crime that, along with murder and negligent homicide, comprises the spectrum of homicide crimes in the United States. Manslaughter is divided into two types: involuntary and voluntary. While murder requires a higher level of intent, involuntary manslaughter charges can follow from either reckless or grossly negligent behavior. Some jurisdictions have also attached criminal liability for simple negligence that results in death. Voluntary manslaughter charges come when a person who would otherwise be charged with murder has a legally recognized justification or excuse that lessens the punishment. Keywords: actus reus; causation; cause in fact; manslaughter; murder; negligent homicide; omissions; proximate cause

This article examines the Law Commission's Consultation Paper, Partial Defences to Murder, which was published in June 2003. There are fundamental problems with the defence of provocation. The author suggests that this partial defence should therefore be abolished and replaced by a new partial defence of self-preservation. This could provide a defence where the offender, or another person with whom he or she is closely associated, has been repeatedly subjected to serious violence or tormenting behaviour. This conduct must have caused the offender to be in a state of severe emotional disturbance at the time of the killing.

Economic analyses of criminal law are frequently and heavily criticized for being unable to explain many criminal law rules and doctrines that people find intuitively just. Existing economic models cannot properly explain, for instance, why criminal law distinguishes between (i) repeat offenders and first-time offenders, (ii) murder and voluntary manslaughter, and (iii) remorseful and non-remorseful offenders. In this Article, I propose a new and richer economic theory of crime that captures the rationales behind these practices, and potentially behind many other important criminal law principles and doctrines. Unlike an overwhelming majority of previous economic analyses, my theory accounts not only for the deterrent effect of criminal punishment, but also for its incapacitative effect. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, it acknowledges the fact that people have fluctuating, rather than constant, criminal tendencies. That is, it recognizes that some people who ordinarily would rarely if ever consider committing a wrongful act can, in rare circumstances, lapse into committing a crime. Surprisingly, these two simple but critical concepts have never been jointly considered in an economic analysis of crime even though their inclusion appears to be an obvious extension of the standard crime and deterrence model formalized almost half a century ago by Gary Becker.The threat of imprisonment deters crime, but even when deterrence fails and a crime is committed, imprisonment benefits society by preventing the criminal from committing further wrongs outside prison for the duration of the sentence. Because these incapacitative benefits exist only if the offender would commit more crimes if left at large, the more strongly we believe that a criminal is dangerous, the stronger the rationale for imprisonment. But since people have fluctuating criminal tendencies, the mere fact that a person committed a crime reveals imperfect information regarding his likelihood of recidivating. As such, the offender’s criminal history and the circumstances surrounding the crime reveal important pieces of information that can be used to update our beliefs concerning the offender’s expected dangerousness – that is, to distinguish those who have made an uncharacteristic mistake from the dangerous and reckless criminals. Capturing the interaction between the incapacitation function of imprisonment and potential offenders’ fluctuating criminal tendencies allows the model to supply specific, consequentialist justifications for repeat offender laws, voluntary manslaughter laws, and the treatment of remorse in criminal law. Going forward, this more nuanced approach will provide a clearer lens through which to view other pervasive elements of criminal law, such as the mens rea requirement, and to revisit the normative prescriptions of the previous generation of economic analyses.

El trabajo plantea la tesis de que puede sancionarse un delito de homicidio simple consumado en concurso ideal con un delito de lesiones consumadas. Para Chile, este novedoso planteamiento tiene una justificación criminológica y político-criminal, cual es la frecuencia estadística de estos hechos y la baja penalidad del homicidio simple, en el límite inferior de la pena, de modo que, en ciertos casos (inexistencia de agravantes o compensación de ellas, existencia de dos o más atenuantes o de una atenuante muy calificada e informe pre-sentencial favorable) el autor puede no recibir una pena proporcionada a la importancia del bien jurídico que destruyó, y puede cumplir la pena bajo el régimen de libertad vigilada; por su parte, los cómplices tienen un régimen penológico que ni siquiera los hace candidatos a la prisión preventiva y menos aún a la privación de libertad en el cumplimiento de la pena. This work states the thesis that voluntary manslaughter can be punished in concurrence of a personal injuries crime. In the case of Chile, this original statement is based on criminological and political-criminal grounds, which are the statistical frequency of these events and the minor punishment for voluntary manslaughter, in the lower limit of the punishment, so that in certain cases (non existence of aggravating circumstances or the compensation of them, existence of two or more extenuating circumstances or of a very solid extenuating circumstance and favorable pre-sentence report) the wrongdoer may not receive a punishment proportional to the importance of the legal rights infringed and can serve sentence under parole; on the other hand, accessories have a punishment regime that doesn't even make them eligible to have pre-trial detention and even less to be deprived of liberty while they are serving sentence.

This article presents the results of an empirical study of intentional homicide cases in Missouri. The authors created a database of 1046 cases; it includes substantially all of the homicide cases prosecuted in Missouri over a five year period that were initially charged as murder or voluntary manslaughter and that yielded criminal convictions. The authors selected 247 cases from the larger database for more detailed analysis. We analyzed geographic and racial disparities in the rates at which: prosecutors charge first-degree murder versus lesser charges; prosecutors seek the death penalty, not lesser punishments; defendants are convicted of first-degree murder versus lesser crimes; and defendants are sentenced to death, not lesser punishments. The Missouri statute gives prosecutors very broad discretion. We estimate that at least 76 percent of the cases in the database are death-eligible under the statute. However, prosecutors pursued capital trials in only about five percent of the cases. Thus, death-eligible cases in which prosecutors chose not to pursue capital trials comprise at least 71 percent of the cases in the database. Prosecutors in different counties exercise their discretion differently, leading to substantial variation in charging and sentencing practices in different counties across the state. The analysis of cases by race of victim and race of defendant shows that there are racial disparities in charging and sentencing decisions, but the racial disparities are not as significant as the geographic disparities. The article presents measures of racial and geographic disparities without controlling for individual culpability; a follow-on study will introduce culpability measures as control variables.

Ewing (1987) has proposed a new legal doctrine called 'Psychological Self-Defense,' which is intended to provide a legal justification for a killing committed under the threat of extremely serious psychological injury. This study examines the effect of such an affirmative defense on the verdict in two vignette cases in which a battered woman killed her abuser. One-hundred ninety-six subjects issued verdicts after reading the case vignettes and a series of jury instructions which varied by self-defense instruction (Psychological Self-Defense Only, Physical Self-Defense Only, Psychological and Physical Self-Defense, or none of these). Only Psychological Self-Defense instructions significantly influenced verdict patterns, primarily by shifting would-be voluntary manslaughter convictions to acquittals. Language: en

At twelve and a half minutes into the broadcast, Detectives Logan and Briscoe arrest two murder suspects. District Attorney Adam Schiff instructs Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy to make the following offer to each separately: If you confess and provide evidence of first-degree murder by your accomplice, you will receive a 1 year sentence on a weapons charge provided that your accomplice does not confess. If she does confess as well, you both will get 8 years for murder II. If you hold out and your accomplice turns state's evidence, you will serve 25 to life for murder I. If she also holds out, you will serve 4 years for voluntary manslaughter. Assuming each suspect loses one unit of utility for each year in prison, Table 5.1 shows the payoffs of each subject given all of the possible outcomes. The rows represent the actions of suspect 1 whereas the columns represent the actions of suspect 2. Each pair of numbers represents the payoffs for suspect 1 and suspect 2 for each combination, respectively. The situation of the suspects is strategic because the outcome of any action by suspect 1 depends on the choices of suspect 2, and vice versa. What should the suspects do? Collectively, they prefer to hold out. If they both hold out, the total jail time is only eight years, far less than any other outcome. Unless, however, they reach a binding agreement, the individual incentives of the suspects undermine this outcome.

Efforts to explain when and why the state can legitimately impose retributive punishment on an actor who inadvertently creates an unjustified risk of causing death (and death results) typically rely on one of two theories. The prior-choice theory claims that retributive punishment for inadvertent lethal risk-creation is justified if and only if the actor's inadvertence or ignorance was a but-for and proximate result of a prior culpable choice. The hypothetical-choice theory claims that retributive punishment for inadvertent lethal risk-creation is justified if and only if the actor would have chosen to take the risk if he had been aware of it, even though he was not in fact aware of it. I argue that neither of these theories satisfactorily identifies when and why retributive punishment is warranted for inadvertent lethal risk-creation. Instead, I propose that an actor who creates a risk of causing death but who was unaware of that risk can fairly be subject to retributive punishment if he was either non-willfully ignorant or self-deceived, and if such ignorance or self-deception was due to the causal influence of a desire he should have controlled. The culpability of such an actor consists, not in any prior actual choice to do wrong, nor in any imagined hypothetical choice to do wrong, but in the culpable failure to exercise doxastic self-control: control over one's beliefs.

The trial of Scott Roeder for murder began in Wichita, Kansas, last week. Although he pleaded not guilty, Mr Roeder has publicly admitted shooting and killing George Tiller, one of the few US doctors who provided late term abortions, in May 2009. The trial had been expected to be about premeditated first degree murder. However, Judge Warren Wilbert has allowed Mr Roeder’s lawyers to plead that he killed Dr Tiller in “voluntary manslaughter” to protect fetuses. Under Kansas law voluntary manslaughter is a killing committed in “an unreasonable but honest belief that circumstances existed that justified deadly force.” The penalty for a conviction on voluntary manslaughter could be five years …