Essays on Degree Murder

The “Son of Sam” Case

The Nature and Type of Defenses Used The main type of defense that was used in this case is the insanity defense. The insanity defense is a common-law excusatory defense under which a defendant in a criminal case asks the court to excuse them from criminal responsibility for their conduct. According to Math, Kumar, and Moirangthem (2015), the insanity defense rides on the assumption that at the material time, the accused person was ailing from a mental illness making them incapable of differentiating right from wrong behavior or appreciating the nature of the crime. The test for establishing the ...

The term ‘actus reus’ refers to the physical component of the crime, while ‘mens rea’ addresses the mental aspect of the offence. Situations, when the alleged perpetrator has the actus reus, but lack mens rea can be different, and a solution depends on the constituent components of a particular crime. First of all, strict liability offences and a range of other offences that differ across statutes and common law under different jurisdictions do not require proving mens rea. Strict liability often refers to minor offences (e.g., selling alcohol to an under-aged individual), where it is hard to determine the ...

Victimology

Post-traumatic stress disorder is a condition usually brought about by witnessing terrifying and in most cases life-threatening events. Such events are mostly psychological in nature and may include natural disasters, war or even other situations that may invoke the feelings of fear or helplessness. Inasmuch as a number of people may recover from the aftereffects of post-traumatic stress disorder, others experience symptoms that get worse with time which are then referred to as the product of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Any experience that acts as a threat to oneself is bound to trigger a fight or a freeze response to ...

One of the peculiar aspects of criminal law is the ability to essentially increase, or decrease, depending on the particular factors of a case, the punishment that an offender would normally expect to have imposed after a conviction (Justia, 2016). These circumstances, which are formally known in criminal law as aggravating and mitigation circumstances, are often used to take into account important aspects of the case that may not have been properly addressed during the trial or plea negotiations. Aggravating and mitigating circumstances are normally applied under the discretion of the sentencing judge; however, for some crimes they might ...

Introduction

People commit a variety of crimes on a daily basis. Some crimes are minor incidents that do not have an extensive consequence or sentence to uphold by the offender. There are crimes that are committed that are in a higher bracket and these crimes have a more serious sentence. People often commit a crime for a number of reasons. Some crimes committed were not even done by the person who was charged in the incident. There needs to be proof or evidence that can place the alleged criminal at the crime scene when it accrued. It is important that ...

In this July 2013 trial, George Zimmerman stood accused of the second-degree murder of teenager Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman had shot Martin in February 2012 after a confrontation between the two in Sanford, Florida. From the beginning, Zimmerman defense team did not deny that he had shot Martin but rather that he shot Martin in self-defense (Linder, 2014). Claiming self-defense is one of the fundamental principles of exculpation in criminal law. The theory underlying exculpation holds that in some situations although a person has otherwise acted criminally, their actions are justified and therefore should not be subject to punishment. In ...

Second Chances

Introduction More than 20 years ago, adult murderers were getting arrested for manslaughter which was common back in those days and people did not expect any concept of juvenile murderers of being created. Incidentally, America was not prepared to send a child to jail for murderous crimes and it can hardly be argued that it was thought inhumane. However, with more juvenile murderers on the rise, more and more people such as families of those murdered have begun to agree that juvenile murderers should be locked up. Cruel and unusual punishment has been mentioned in cases such as these ...

Innocence

Introduction The Innocence Project is a nonprofit organization which operates with the sole goal of freeing the wrongfully convicted in the United States. It was the result of a study in the late 1980s which revealed that a vast majority of eyewitness testimonies were inaccurate and identification by eyewitnesses resulted in seventy percent of the wrongfully convicted population. In the United States, one out of every seven convicts is innocent. Hence, with the advent of DNA technology in the early 1990s, the Innocence Project came into existence with Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld heading the initiative from the Benjamin ...

Juvenile Murderers: A Second Chance or Death

Introduction The question over treatment of juvenile murderers creates a major debate in the social and political circles. There are proponents of public supporting punishment in the form of a life in prison without parole called LWOP, many believe that capital punishment is needed, and others support the implementation of life in prison with work and restitution called LWOP + W/R (Moon, Wright, Cullen, & Pealer, 2000, p. 663). One common aspect is the belief of the public is the need for bringing people to justice by either jail time or capital punishment. Another important aspect of the juvenile punishment system ...

African Americans have suffered from police brutality in the United States since time in memorial. It is disheartening to see unarmed African Americans suffer in the hands of white police with many either sustaining serious unimaginable injuries or even in extreme cases losing their lives. It is quite unclear how racial discrimination continues to haunt even the new century with more fatalities recorded in the civilized era where governments have enacted policies to protect each person from all sort of discrimination. Police brutality is and has been an increasingly notorious act of discrimination of the colored skin people, mostly ...

Introduction

There are four ways through which individuals in the world ultimately expire or die. The four include suicide, murder, accident and natural death. Among the four ways, the one that attracts the most attention is murder. Murder, also referred to as homicide, is the act of one individual killing the other. However, there are sometimes when homicide is not criminal. For example, a person can kill another while defending themselves. In other cases, someone may be given the authority by law to take the life of the other individual who may have committed serious crimes.

A Summary of the History and Evolution of the Law Regarding Murder

In developing the homicide ...

Introduction

There are a couple of important fundamental differences between a criminal action and a civil action. One of the most apparent differences is the nature of the cause of action underlying the suit. As its name denotes, a criminal action is derived from a past crime that has been committed. A civil action, on the other hand, does not involve a crime, but rather a private wrong to an individual or a group of individuals. Another fundamental distinction between a criminal and civil action is that the parties go to the court. In a criminal action, the prosecution represents ...

Introduction

No form of punishment engenders more controversy than the death penalty. Although capital punishment has been used since ancient times, its modern utilization is repeatedly called into question. The United States stands alone among Western world counterparts in its continued use of the death penalty. Among the international community, the general trend largely reflects a discontinuance of capital punishment. For instance, member states of the European Union have all abolished the death penalty (Shin, 2007, p. 505). Given the overwhelming number of nations that have since abolished the death penalty, it is somewhat surprising that the United States continues ...

On Feb 5, 2016, a judge in a California Court sentenced Dr. Hsiu Tseng to life in prison for 30 years for the involuntary murder of her patients who totalled 3 in number. Her patients had according to the District Attorney overdosed on the prescriptions that she wrote. When Dr. Tseng joined Rowland Clinic in California in 2007, little did she know that it would be the last place she would ever practice in her professison. On her short-lived career at Rowland Clinic, she wrote prescriptions for more than 27,000 patients. This translated to about 25 patients in ...