Murder

Shani D'Cruze, Sandra Walklate, Samantha Pegg, Sandra L. Walklate

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134018062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book seeks to unravel the issues associated with the crime of murder, providing a highly accessible account of the subject for people coming to it for the first time. It uses detailed case studies as a way of exemplifying and exploring more general questions of socio-cultural responses to murder and their explanation. It incorporates a historical perspective which both provides some fascinating examples from the past and enables readers to gain a vision of what has changed and what has remained the same within those socio-cultural responses to murder.

The book also embraces questions of race and gender, in particular cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity on the one hand, and the social processes of 'forgetting and remembering' in the context of particular crimes on the other. Particular murders analysed included those of Myra Hindley, Harold Shipman and the Bulger murder.

Chapter 1

Cataloguing murder

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 (Rock 1998a: 8).

Introduction

The act of murder has always aroused public interest, yet there is surprisingly little written about this crime from a criminological perspective. Much of the academic material that is available focuses for the most part on particular kinds of killing (like, for example, serial killing or women who kill), or endeavours to offer an encyclopaedia-style approach to the crime, or deals with the process of making sense of particular (notorious) murderers. The majority of the rest of material available is very much in the ‘100 worst crimes’ genre or comprises rather more journalistic accounts of particular murders or murderers. Homicide has suffered from, as Rock (1998a: 9) says, ‘an intellectual neglectfulness’. The most recent exception to this rule is found in the work of Brookman (2005) who offers a comprehensive overview of the various means available to criminologists to make sense of the more generic crime of homicide.

As will become evident in this chapter, homicide is a general term that, in England and Wales, is used to cover the killing of one human being by another, regardless of motive or circumstance. This distinction between homicide and murder and the various ways in which these terms are applied in different jurisdictions is one of the first problems to address when discussing murder. An awareness of this distinction is crucial for an understanding of the focus of this book.

This book is not about homicide in general although it must be said that, in the act of writing the words here, homicide and murder may be used interchangeably depending upon the context and the references being used. Such a process notwithstanding, this book is about murder, one particular kind of murder, that we have called ‘interpersonal’ murder. Now in some senses this idea of ‘interpersonal’ murder is rather an odd term to use both legally and socially as all murders are in some sense interpersonal. This term is used here, however, to mark the boundaries of this book in a very real way. It means that we are not concerned to address murder as a result of terrorist activity, corporate homicide, mass murderers or even deaths that result from road traffic accidents. This is not to say that all these different kinds of killing are not salient or do not carry with them all kinds of questions about how the act of murder is constituted, especially legally. We are bounding our concerns to the more ‘routine’, everyday life, ‘domestic’ kind of murders (the mundane acts referred to in the quotation taken from Rock used at the beginning of this chapter) that conjure the kinds of violent practices that are familiar, often familial, and feared. In taking this kind of bounded approach our intention is to explore murder in those circumstances in which, as an act, it carries its most powerful cultural meanings and consequences on the family, relatives and the wider community.

So this exploration of murder is also an exploration of the routine and often mundane way in which such events occur, and in being routine and mundane conveys very powerful cultural and social messages about the murderer and their victim. It is within the banality of such events that it is possible to explore the continuing power of social class, gender and race, and their social construction. In the chapters that follow we shall use historical and more contemporary case-study material to illustrate the power that such social constructions have. However, before we can proceed to do that it is important to discuss the legal definition of the crime that we are concerned with, what kind of sources of information we can access about this crime, identify the nature and extent of it, explore what the problems are in counting it, examine the impact of this kind of crime on family and the wider community and, finally, return to the question of the problem of social construction. We shall discuss each of these issues in turn.

Defining murder

As has already been suggested, murder is differently constituted from homicide though both involve the act of killing a human being. In simple terms, homicide in England and Wales refers to the act of killing one human being by another human being regardless of whether that act is lawful or unlawful. Lawful acts of killing occur in wartime, or, historically, in the use of the death penalty. Unlawful acts of killing include those acts that are classified as murder, manslaughter and infanticide. All these acts of unlawful killing share a common concern with the actus reus (whether what was done was against the law) and the mens rea (whether the person who committed the act intended its consequences). This required combination of actus reus (guilty act) and mens rea (guilty mind) admits that there are different levels of intention (or guilt) in people who commit unlawful killing and the law tries to meet the challenge of this recognition by allowing for different defences for murder which, if successful, can reduce a charge of murder to manslaughter. The charge of manslaughter subsequently carries reduced penalties. However, before we discuss the relevance of these different defences for murder, it is important to establish what counts as murder in the first instance.

The classic and commonly agreed definition of murder is attributed to Sir Edward Coke embedded in the Crime against the Persons Act 1861 who stated that:

Murder is when a man of sound memory, and of the age of discretion, unlawfully killest within any county of the realm any reasonable creature in rerum natura under the King’s peace, with malice aforethought, either expressed by the party or implied by law, so as the party wounded or hurt etc. die of the wound or hurt etc. within a year and a day after the same.

There has only been one real change to this definition as applied to England and Wales which amended the ‘year and a day’ rule to be a period within the discretion of the Attorney General dependent upon how the victim died qua the Law Reform (Year and a Day Rule) Act 1996. The difference between homicide, murder and manslaughter lies in the understanding of ‘malice aforethought’. Manslaughter, for instance, is defined as the unlawful killing of another without malice implied or expressed.

Central to all these definitions, then, is the state of mind of the defendant at the time: their motive. In the case of murder/ manslaughter this means the presence or absence of ‘malice aforethought’ though the term ‘malice’ does not necessarily carry with it its everyday meaning. In law ‘malice’ and ‘aforethought’ are technical terms: malice does not necessarily mean spite or ill-will and aforethought does not necessarily mean premeditation. These terms, used technically, ask for a consideration of what the defendant’s actions were aimed at. So juries are asked to consider the question of ‘intention’ to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. In other words they are asked to consider what was likely to be the highest probable outcome of the course of action taken by the defendant.

Constructing motive is therefore key to the criminal trial and key to whether or not a specific act is defined as murder or manslaughter. Three defences can reduce the charge of murder to manslaughter: self-defence, provocation and diminished responsibility. Given the central importance of the criminal trial in bringing the defendant and their motivation into being, and to convince the jury of the nature of this, it will be of some value to say a little about each of these defences and the problems inherent within them.

As has been implied above, the central purpose of the criminal trial in an adversarial criminal justice system like that in England and Wales is not to establish the truth of what happened but to establish a case that convinces the jury of the guilt or innocence of the defendant. In that setting, the stories that are told about what happened and how those stories are stitched together to make sense of the available evidence constitute an important part of how the defendant, in this case the accused murderer, is constituted as a subject for the jury. Given that a conviction for murder carries with it a mandatory life sentence contemporarily, and carried with it the death sentence historically, how the accused and their actions are presented to the jury has important consequences. The law recognises this and also recognises that under certain circumstances the outcome of particular events either could not be avoided or the accused could not be reasonably expected to have behaved otherwise. Under these kinds of circumstances there are three legitimate defences in which the charge of murder may be reduced to manslaughter with consequent less severe penalties. However, each of these defences is differently problematic both in their interpretation and in their availability to defendants.

For example, the claim of self-defence has to demonstrate that the accused was initially the victim and that failure to protect oneself would have resulted in one’s own death. In other words, the course of action taken had to be in the immediate circumstances of the events under consideration and seen to be constituted as a result of being in fear of one’s own life. In a similar vein, in claiming provocation, it has to be demonstrated that the provoked response was immediate and considered to be what any person would do under the same circumstances. In cases of diminished responsibility, medical evidence has to show that the person was not in their ‘right mind’ at the time of the event. Each of these defences seems to work differently for different categories of defendants. For example, the defence of provocation seems to be more successful for men than for women, with the reverse being the case with diminished responsibility (with respect to the latter, see Allen 1987). Many feminists would argue that the difference in the success of these defences can largely be traced to the central importance in law of the ‘reasonable man of law’ (see, for example, Naffine 1990). This concept acts as a measure against which particular courses of action are judged; what would a reasonable man have done under these circumstances? Contemporarily a judge may ask a jury to consider what a reasonable person might have done under the circumstances, but the central guiding influence of what counts as reasonable and in whose terms has changed little.

These guiding principles constitute the framework within which defendants are constituted as subjects, as either individuals with a sense of agency (in control and to be held accountable for their actions) or as individuals without agency (not in control of themselves and thereby claiming a legitimate defence for their actions). In either case, the defence or the prosecution must constitute the defendant in a way that makes sense in the light of the evidence though, of course, in so doing, they each might construct quite different stories. These ‘stories’ clearly suggest that both the act of murder and the murderer are socially constructed, rooted in the attribution of culpability (blame) and understanding the nature of victim vulnerability (May 1999). So who the victim was (an elderly ‘defenceless’ person or a young child) interacts with the attribution of blame, not just within the public and media reaction to murder but also in the construction of intention within the court. This general assertion looks somewhat different in cases of infanticide.

The Infanticide Act 1922 created a special offence for a woman who caused the death of her own child under 12 months old while ‘the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effects of giving birth to the child or by reason of the effect of lactation consequent upon the birth of her child’. So infanticide is an unlawful killing that can only be committed by the biological mother of the child with the legislation predefining the motive for the Act. This Act has a controversial history with some arguing that it offers women (mothers) preferential treatment though it is a piece of legislation that is rarely used contemporarily. It is, however, interesting in that it offers a particular construction of women (motherhood) that we shall return to in Chapter 3.

By implication, then, murder is a crime constructed in both the legal and social arena. The legal definition of murder differs little from that of manslaughter since it relies upon the same actus reus and demands an intent to kill or cause serious injury. The line between murder and manslaughter as a consequence rests upon the moral culpability of the accused. As Jefferson expresses it, ‘the difference resides in morality: the murderer is more morally culpable than a person guilty of manslaughter’ (2003: 39). While a body of law has built up to express the difference in moral culpability between, for example, one who stabs a partner to death without justification and one who does so after years of abuse, the legal parameters are, in some cases, very finely drawn. Our social understanding of murder, and by extension murderers, is shaped by these very subtle differences in the circumstances surrounding the criminal act. As May expresses it, the social value of a violent act is linked to complex social understandings which ‘seem to revolve around notions of culpability and victimisation, mediated by interpretations of what is deemed to be appropriate behaviour for the social actors’ (1999: 490).

This book comprises a study of murder through an appraisal of decided cases. In these cases we explore the subtle shifts that comprise the construction of the murderer. In order to do this, the cases we explore rely on a number of primary and secondary resources. So, in order for the reader to appreciate the case studies we have used, it is useful to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the variety of data sources on which research of this kind is dependent, so we shall consider some of those issues in the next section of this chapter.

A word on quantitative and qualitative research

The collection of information for research purposes may be brought under two very broad headings: quantitative research and qualitative research. Quantitative research methods rely upon statistical analysis to measure variables and to confirm, question or establish a hypothesis. Quantitative research is a common tool in criminological research of which the police-recorded crime figures are one example. Statistical data provide comparable data sets that can be easily utilised for reference and longitudinal comparison. However, such quantitative research may provide us with a set of statistics that need further interpretation. They may, for example, present us with the number of spousal killings in a given year but do not set out to consider these individual cases in detail. Qualitative research can address case examples or topics in depth with particular emphasis upon answering the questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’. For example, in this text we shall see that murder is an act commonly committed by an individual known to the victim (see the data later in this chapter). However, qualitative research suggests that public fears concerning murder continue to hinge around ‘stranger danger’, a statistically less common form of the offence. Qualitative research may question why these concerns arise given the statistical evidence, what influences public fear and how such concerns come into being. Such qualitative data may be collected by way of objective assessments, including observations, interviews, open-ended questionnaires and texts. An assessment of these sources by way of case study or content analysis may be used to propel the research and to promote further analysis, challenge assumptions and build hypothesises.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods of research have their drawbacks. In the field of criminological inquiry, ‘hard’ statistical data provided by quantitative research are invaluable for tracking trends, yet they do not tell us those underlying causes behind trends. Particularly when mapping trends over longer time periods, changes in how data were accumulated, categorised and recorded can make interpretation difficult. Qualitative research seeks to address this, yet is commonly constrained by the sample size; a small group of participants or case examples may provide insight into those particular incidences but is not necessarily illustrative of the wider picture.

Whether qualitative or quantitative, the starting point for any research is the availability and validity of source material. Such source materials may be divided into two ‘groups’, primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are those sources from which ‘original’ information and analysis may be drawn. This encompasses a wide range of documentation, from those first-hand reports of events in the form of letters, diaries, court transcription, journals, speeches, interviews and artistic representations, to the more structured research surveys and statistics. As the product of an individual, or group of individuals, these primary sources provide a very particular narrative of events that must be regarded as individualistic and therefore checked against other primary source material for bias and inaccuracies. Likewise those source materials not created for wider public dissemination, such as in-house reports and police records, may provide an alternative view of events but the question to be asked of these sources is why and for whom they were written. However, many of these kinds of data sources are crucial to the kinds of case studies on which the exploration in this book is based.

Secondary sources are commonly considered to be any document written by an individual who was not present at the event about which they are writing. As such these commonly take the form of books, certain journal and research articles, and newspaper reports that present a mediated view of an event or topic. Again such resources are subject to restrictions by way of the author’s agenda, the parameters set and the primary resources utilised. Second...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Cataloguing murder
• 2 Devils and demons: the social construction of murder and murderers
• 3 Murderous women
• 4 Murderous children
• 5 Murderous men: intimate and domestic killings
• 6 Murderous men: killing friends and acquaintances
• 7 Rendering them pathological
• References
• Index