I learned this today. The idea that manslaughter is different to murder was introduced in Athens in 409 BC.
This is a difficult question because the laws of different countries are extremely different and many different societies developed different laws at different times. Some of those laws and societies have disappeared and some of those laws have been adopted by other civilizations and have gone on to form our modern law.
Manslaughter law varies from country to country, but it is generally used to show that the offender had less culpability than in a murder.
There are two types of manslaughter and each one has more categories inside it. The two main groups are voluntary and involuntary manslaughter.
In voluntary manslaughter, the offender had the intent to harm or kill but was too emotionally or mentally disturbed at that time to be completely responsible. “Heat of passion” crimes fall into this category. Voluntary manslaughter falls between self-defense and murder. If you kill someone who has broken into your home and threatened you with a gun, that could be self-defense. If you kill someone who broke into your house, unarmed, and you kill them, that could be voluntary manslaughter. If a wife catches her husband cheating and stabs him with a knife she was holding, that could be voluntary manslaughter.
Involuntary manslaughter, as the name implies, is when the offender did not intend for anybody to die. This has two subcategories: constructive manslaughter and criminally negligent manslaughter. In constructive manslaughter, the offender was doing something illegal when somebody was accidentally killed. For example, if somebody accidentally kills a pedestrian who runs out in front of them, it is probably accidental death. If somebody accidentally kills a pedestrian after driving through a red light, it is constructive manslaughter because driving through a red light is a crime. The US separates driving crimes that cause accidental death into vehicular manslaughter.
Criminally negligent manslaughter is when someone has a duty to act, but fails to due to negligence. For example, if a doctor forgets that they have given a patient an injection of a drug and they give them another, causing death. This would probably be negligent manslaughter.
In many countries, killing someone was murder, unless it was in a time of war, or if one of the parties was rich. The Athenians introduced the first legal differentiation between intentional and unintentional killing in 409 BC. Their law states that intentional murder was punishable by death while accidental killing was probably punishable by exile. In 621 BC, an Athenian called Draco was the first person to create a written code of law in Ancient Greece. Before he wrote things down, there was only an oral law and that was unreliable. He made a system that had to be enforced in a court of law. His laws were carved into wood and displayed for almost 2 centuries. In 409 BC, the Athenians decided to revise some of the laws, including the murder law. The law seems to say that if a man unintentionally kills another, he would be exiled. However, examples show that quite often even accidental killing resulted in execution.
I think this can be seen as a good place to base the start of the law because Ancient Greek law is connected to the laws we use today (in Europe and America), through their adoptions by the Romans, and then European countries.
Anglo-Saxon law, which was created after the 5th century AD, had different levels of murder. The worst was forsteall, which meant killing by ambush. Aggravated killing was called murdra, and is where the word murder comes from. It is connected to the Norse word morð, which meant secret slaughter. Different types of killing had different punishments and, as with most things, the rich received different punishments to the poor. A good example of this is one of Draco’s laws for non-payment of debt. If the defaulter was of a lower class than the loan giver, they would be taken into slavery. If the defaulter was of a higher class, the punishment was far more lenient.
By 1200, the word manslaughter was a general term for murder. It obviously comes from the English “man” and “slaughter”. But, the idea that self-defense and accidental killing were different was starting to appear. In 1348, murdrum became associated with planning and intentional killing, while manslaughter started to take on the idea of less responsibility. In 1390, murder in self-defense and murder by accident, both became pardonable offenses.
In 1547, the law was changed so that manslaughter would cover killings other than murder.
So, the idea of there being an excuse for murder based on a lack of responsibility appears to have been introduced in 409 BC. However, the laws have changed many times since then and now, and, of course, the laws in different countries are all slightly different. And this is what I learned today.
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Photo by EKATERINA BOLOVTSOVA: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-wooden-gavel-on-brown-wooden-table-6077326/
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter_(United_States_law)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(lawgiver)
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/homicide-murder-and-manslaughter
https://www.legis.la.gov/legis/Law.aspx?d=78338
https://www.etymonline.com/word/murder
https://www.etymonline.com/word/manslaughter