Aggravating circumstances[edit]

Murder with specified aggravating circumstances is often punished more harshly. Depending on the
jurisdiction, such circumstances may include:

 Premeditation
 Poisoning
 Murder of a child
 Murder of a police officer,[49][50] judge, firefighter or witness to a crime[51]
 Murder of a pregnant woman[52]
 Crime committed for pay or other reward, such as contract killing[53]
 Exceptional brutality or cruelty
 Methods which are dangerous to the public,[54] e.g. explosion, arson, shooting in a crowd etc.[55]
 Murder for a political cause[49][56]
 Murder committed in order to conceal another crime or facilitate its commission.[57]
 Hate crimes, which occur when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their perceived
membership in a certain social group.
 Treachery (e.g. Heimtücke in German law)
In the United States[58] and Canada,[59] these murders are referred to as first-
degree or aggravated murders. Murder, under English criminal law, always carries a mandatory life
sentence, but is not classified into degrees. Penalties for murder committed under aggravating
circumstances are often higher, under English law, than the 15-year minimum non-parole period that
otherwise serves as a starting point for a murder committed by an adult.

Felony murder rule[edit]

Main article: Felony murder rule
A legal doctrine in some common law jurisdictions broadens the crime of murder: when an offender
kills in the commission of a dangerous crime, (regardless of intent), he/she is guilty of murder. The
felony murder rule is often justified by its supporters as a means of deterring dangerous
felonies,[60] but the case of Ryan Holle[61] shows it can be used very widely.

Year-and-a-day rule[edit]
Main article: Year and a day rule
In some common law jurisdictions, a defendant accused of murder is not guilty if the victim survives
for longer than one year and one day after the attack.[62] This reflects the likelihood that if the victim
dies, other factors will have contributed to the cause of death, breaking the chain of causation; and
also means that the responsible person does not have a charge of murder "hanging over their head
indefinitely".[63] Subject to any statute of limitations, the accused could still be charged with an
offence reflecting the seriousness of the initial assault.
With advances in modern medicine, most countries have abandoned a fixed time period and test
causation on the facts of the case. This is known as "delayed death" and cases where this was
applied or was attempted to be applied go back to at least 1966.[64]
In England and Wales, the "year-and-a-day rule" was abolished by the Law Reform (Year and a Day
Rule) Act 1996. However, if death occurs three years or more after the original attack then
prosecution can take place only with the Attorney-General's approval.
In the United States, many jurisdictions have abolished the rule as well.[65][66] Abolition of the rule has
been accomplished by enactment of statutory criminal codes, which had the effect of displacing the
common-law definitions of crimes and corresponding defences. In 2001 the Supreme Court of the
United States held that retroactive application of a state supreme court decision abolishing the year-
and-a-day rule did not violate the Ex Post Facto Clause of Article I of the United States
Constitution.[67]
The potential effect of fully abolishing the rule can be seen in the case of 74-year-old William
Barnes, charged with the murder of a Philadelphia police officer Walter T. Barclay Jr., who he had
shot nearly 41 years previously. Barnes had served 16 years in prison for attempting to murder
Barkley, but when the policeman died on August 19, 2007, this was alleged to be from complications
of the wounds suffered from the shooting – and Barnes was charged with his murder. He was
acquitted on May 24, 2010.[68]

Murder and natural selection[edit]

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Martin Daly and Margo Wilson of McMaster University have claimed that several aspects
of homicides, including the genetic relations or proximity between murderers and their victims, (as in
the Cinderella effect), can often be explained by the evolution theory or evolutionary psychology.[69]

Historical and religious attitudes[edit]

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A group of Thugs strangling a traveller on a highway in the early 19th century.

In the Abrahamic religions, the first ever murder was committed by Cain against his brother Abel out
of jealousy.[70] In the past, certain types of homicide were lawful and justified. Georg Oesterdiekhoff
wrote:
Evans-Pritchard says about the Nuer from Sudan: "Homicide is not forbidden, and Nuer do not think
it wrong to kill a man in fair fight. On the contrary, a man who slays another in combat is admired for
his courage and skill." (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 195) This statement is true for most African tribes, for
pre-modern Europeans, for Indigenous Australians, and for Native Americans, according to
ethnographic reports from all over the world. ... Homicides rise to incredible numbers
among headhunter cultures such as the Papua. When a boy is born, the father has to kill a man. He
needs a name for his child and can receive it only by a man, he himself has murdered. When a man
wants to marry, he must kill a man. When a man dies, his family again has to kill a man.[71]

In many such societies the redress was not via a legal system, but by blood revenge, although there
might also be a form of payment that could be made instead—such as the weregild which in
early Germanic society could be paid to the victim's family in lieu of their right of revenge.
One of the oldest-known prohibitions against murder appears in the Sumerian Code of Ur-
Nammu written sometime between 2100 and 2050 BC. The code states, "If a man commits a
murder, that man must be killed."
In Judeo-Christian traditions, the prohibition against murder is one of the Ten Commandments given
by God to Moses in (Exodus: 20v13) and (Deuteronomy 5v17). The Vulgate and subsequent early
English translations of the Bible used the term secretly killeth his neighbour or smiteth his neighbour
secretly rather than murder for the Latin clam percusserit proximum.[72][73] Later editions such
as Young's Literal Translation and the World English Bible have translated the Latin occides simply
as murder[74][75] rather than the alternatives of kill, assassinate, fall upon, or slay.
In Islam according to the Qur'an, one of the greatest sins is to kill a human being who has committed
no fault. "For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being
for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and
whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind."[Quran 5:32] "And those
who cry not unto any other god along with Allah, nor take the life which Allah hath forbidden save in
(course of) justice, nor commit adultery – and whoso doeth this shall pay the penalty."[Quran 25:68]
The term assassin derives from Hashshashin,[76] a militant Ismaili Shi'ite sect, active from the 8th to
14th centuries. This mystic secret society killed members of
the Abbasid, Fatimid, Seljuq and Crusader elite for political and religious
reasons.[77] The Thuggee cult that plagued India was devoted to Kali, the goddess of death and
destruction.[78][79] According to some estimates the Thuggees murdered 1 million people between
1740 and 1840.[80] The Aztecs believed that without regular offerings of blood the sun
god Huitzilopochtli would withdraw his support for them and destroy the world as they knew
it.[81] According to Ross Hassig, author of Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400 persons"
were sacrificed in the 1487 re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan.[82][83]
Southern slave codes did make willful killing of a slave illegal in most cases.[84] For example, the
1860 Mississippi case of Oliver v. State charged the defendant with murdering his own slave.[85] In
1811, the wealthy white planter Arthur Hodge was hanged for murdering several of his slaves on his
plantation in the British West Indies.[86][self-published source]
In Corsica, vendetta was a social code that required Corsicans to kill anyone who wronged their
family honor. Between 1821 and 1852, no fewer than 4,300 murders were perpetrated in Corsica.[87]