Corpus delicti

“ In the same manner that a very small portion or fragment of the human body may suffice to establish the corpus delicti, so will minute remains or traces, as finger-marks, footprints, and other material surroundings, even smells or traces of perfume, be of great assistance to justice in determining the identity of both culprit and victim, and at the same time throw light on the attendant circumstances of the deed. ”

“ In each case the murdered man turned out to be alive, and justice was the only murderer. After Harrison's case, and ⸻'s, no Cumberland jury will ever commit for murder, unless the corpus delicti has been found, and with signs of violence upon it. Come, come, Mr. Atkins, you are too good a lawyer, and too humane a man, to send my client to prison on the suspicion of a suspicion, which you know the very breath of the judge will blow away, even if the grand jury let it go into court. I offer bail, ten thousand pounds in two sureties; Sir George Neville here present, and myself. ”

“ Recurring to remarks concerning the legal necessity of obtaining a plea to the indictment or information, in order, possibly, to show the presence of the accused, and speculating upon that as the origin of the theory of the common law requiring the personal presence of the accused in order to give the court jurisdiction to try the case, and the proof of the corpus delicti in order to convict, it seems132 proper that a similar course of procedure and reasoning should prevail in cases of heresy, an offence which dealt so largely with matters of belief ”

“ Houseman?" said the magistrate, civilly; and laid his pen down to hear them.
"Briefly, sir, these. Where a murder is proven, you can commit a subject of this realm upon suspicion. But you cannot suspect the murder as well as the culprit, and so commit. The murder must be proved to the senses. Now in this case, the death of Mr. Gaunt by violence is not proved. Indeed, his very death rests but upon suspicion. I admit that the law of England in this respect has once or twice been tampered with, and persons have even been executed where no corpus delicti was found ”

“ One great defect of this system is that it is impossible to define crimes, delicts and contraventions in such a way as to distinguish them logically one from another. For, what logical difference is there between a crime and a delict? There is none. They are both offences. It is no wonder then that the French Penal Code simply begs the question by saying that a crime is an offence liable to afflictive or infamous punishments or to both; a delict is an offence liable to correctional punishments, and a contravention is an offence liable to police punishments. ”

“ Every murder perpetrated by poison, lying in wait, or nay other kind of willful, deliberate, malicious, and premeditated killing; or committed in the perpetration of, or attempt to perpetrate, any arson, escape, murder, kidnapping, treason, espionage, sabotage, aggravated sexual abuse or sexual abuse, burglary, or robbery; or perpetrated from a premeditated design unlawfully and maliciously to effect the death of any human being other than him who is killed, is murder in the first degree. Any other murder is murder in the second degree. ”

“ They are met by the officers of the revenue; one of the party, in the prosecution of this unlawful design, fires on the King’s officer, and kills him or any of his assistants: the whole party is, in the eye of the law, guilty of murder, though their original intention went no further than smuggling; for that intention being unlawful, the killing in prosecution of that intent is murder, and every man engaged in it partakes of the guilt. The act of one, in prosecution of their common engagement, is considered as the act of all. ”

“ A man who puts to death a criminal who had been apprehended, and made no resistance, shall be strangled, according to the law against homicide committed in an affray.
4. A man who falsely accuses an innocent person of theft (in cases of greatest criminality) is guilty of a capital offence; in all other cases the offenders, whether principals or accessaries, shall be sent into exile.
5. A man who wounds another unintentionally shall be tried according to the law respecting blows given in an affray, and the punishment rendered more or less severe, according to the degree of injury sustained. ”

“ You may possibly have noted the form of indictment in the murder cases; and if so, one odd detail must have impressed you. Having set forth the weapon used by the murderer, the document invariably goes on to estimate its money value: for, having been instrumental in taking human life, it was forfeit to the Crown, and it or its price had to be duly accounted for. It was called a Deodand, but the name was applied to many things besides arms used with malice aforethought. Thus, a man died by misadventure: then was the material cause active or passive? ”

“ The striker is indicted and tried for murder. Now he is doubtless guilty of manslaughter, but he is less dangerous to the community than a professional thief who preys upon the public by impersonating a gasman or telephone repairer and by thus gaining access to private [Pg 9] dwellings steals the owner's property. One is an accidental, the other an intentional criminal. One is hostile to society as a whole and the other is probably not really hostile to anybody. Yet the less guilty is denominated a murderer, and the other is rarely held guilty of more than petty larceny. ”

“ He was the first to plead for proportion between the punishment and the crime, and to point out the folly of the cruel penalties of his day. "Simple theft is not so great an offence as to be punished with death." If a thief and a murderer are sure of the same penalty, More shows that the law is simply tempting the thief to secure his theft by murder. ”

“ The injured would not prosecute, juries would not convict on clear evidence, judges recommended to mercy, and criminals were emboldened by the chances of escape. The heavy punishments attached to light offences tended to multiply serious crimes; for a thief who knew that he might be hanged was tempted to commit murder rather than be caught. ”

“ But if, notwithstanding all the Rubs which we have seen to lie in the Way, the Indictment is found, and the Thief brought to his Trial, still he hath sufficient Hopes of escaping, either from the Caution of the Prosecutor's Evidence, or from the Hardiness of his own.
In Street Robberies the Difficulty of convicting a Criminal is extremely great. ”

“ Thus such crimes as theft from or robbery of an officer, soldier, post trader, or camp-follower; forgery of the name of an officer, and manslaughter, assault with intent to kill, mayhem, or battery, committed upon a military person; inasmuch as they directly affect military relations and prejudice military discipline, may properly be-as they frequently have been-the subject of charges under the present Article. ”

“ It is familiar law in my country that if two or more persons set out to rob a bank, in accordance with a criminal scheme to that end, and in the course of carrying out their scheme one of the conspirators commits the crime of murder, all of the participants in the planning and execution of the bank robbery are guilty of murder, whether or not they had any other personal participation in the killing. ”

“ As when there is an acquittal on one count, and a verdict of guilty on another. Or when the charge is of a higher degree, including one of a lesser, there may be a finding by a partial verdict of the latter. As upon a charge of burglary, there may be a conviction for a larceny, and an acquittal of the nocturnal entry. So, upon an indictment for murder, there may be a verdict of manslaughter, and robbery may be reduced to simple larceny, and a battery into an assault. ”

“ Dougherty, the tiny, bald-headed clerk with the big mustaches that made him look like an animated mushroom, picked up the indictments on the top of the blue pile in front of him.
“Patrick Mooney and Daniel Mulligan,” he intoned as if officiating at the high altar of the cathedral, “you are jointly indicted for the crime of burglary in the third degree, grand larceny in the first degree, assault in the first degree, receiving stolen goods and carrying concealed weapons. How say you? Do you plead guilty or not guilty?” ”

“ The criminal law which had its origin when violence was rife is admirably adapted to the prevention, prosecuting and punishment of crude crimes, such as arson, rape, robbery, burglary, mayhem, assault, homicide, and "common-law" larceny,—theft accompanied by a trespass. In old times everything was against the man charged with crime—at least that was the attitude of the court and jury. "Aha!" exclaims the judge as the evidence goes in. ”

“ By the first crime act of the United States, forgery of public securities, or knowingly uttering forged public securities with intent to defraud, as well as treason, murder, piracy, mutiny, robbery, or rescue of a person convicted of a capital crime, was punishable with death; most other offenses were punished by fine and imprisonment; whipping was part of the punishment of stealing or falsifying records, fraudulently acknowledging bail, larceny of goods, or receiving stolen goods ”

“ If any one convict in a court of law a stranger or a slave of a theft of public property, let the court determine what punishment he shall suffer, or what penalty he shall pay, bearing in mind that he is probably not incurable. But the citizen who has been brought up as our citizens will have been, if he be found guilty of robbing his country by fraud or violence, whether he be caught in the act or not, shall be punished with death ”

“ Boys charged with attempting to pick pockets or burglarize small stores, with assaulting police officers, carrying concealed weapons such as knives and brass knuckles, having policy-slips in their possession, rioting, malicious mischief, etc., are usually acquitted. This is because the jury think that they have been already punished enough for the character of offence which they have committed,—not because they believe them innocent. ”

“ It is notorious, in fact, that the jury is more rigorous in regard to prisoners accused of crimes against property than in regard to those accused of crimes against the person, especially crimes instigated by personal motives such as hate, vengeance, or the like; for every juryman thinks that he himself might be a victim of the exploits of a thief, or the attacks of a murderer for the sake of gain; whereas there is less reason to fear a murder provoked by vengeance, an outrage, an embezzlement of public money, or the like. ”

“ Thus, if the legislature defines some core crime and then provides for increasing the punishment of that crime upon a finding of some aggravating fact—of whatever sort, including the fact of a prior conviction—the core crime and the aggravating fact together constitute an aggravated crime, just as much as grand larceny is an aggravated form of petit larceny. The aggravating fact is an element of the aggravated crime. ”

“ Of course it is apparent that so long as we have crimes committed the wrongdoer must be punished. Wrongdoers naturally try to conceal the evidence of their crimes: the murderer seeks to hide the revolver, the thief seeks to hide the money, the bonds, or the jewels. ”

“ If a person be charged with the commission of murder, piracy, arson, robbery, or forgery within the United States of America, and ‘charged upon such evidence of criminality as according to the law of the place where the fugitive or person so charged shall be found would justify his apprehension and commitment for trial, if the crime or offence had been there committed,’ he may be apprehended, and his case is to be heard, and considered. ”

“ Thus, for example, it is a felony in England to steal a pair of shoes, the offender is sent before the Court of Assize, and his offense counts in the official returns as a "crime;" in France, on the contrary, a petty theft is considered a délit, or simple offense, is punished by a police magistrate, and figures in the returns as an "offense." With respect to murders, too, the English have only two general names for killing—murder or manslaughter—but the French have nearly a dozen categories of killing, of which what the English call murder forms only one. ”

“ They were then sent back to the tender mercies of the opium-smoking jailer, probably to come back again and again to undergo the severer forms of torture, till no more money can be squeezed out of their friends, when they will probably be beheaded, death being the legal penalty for robbery with aggravations.
There is no regular legal process, no jury, no one admitted to plead for the accused, and owing to the way in which accusations are made and the intimate association of trial with bribery, it is as certain that many innocent persons suffer as it is that many guilty escape. ”

“ I believe, every thief will confess, that he has been more than once seized and dismissed; and that he has sometimes ventured upon capital crimes, because he knew, that those whom he injured would rather connive at his escape, than cloud their minds with the horrours of his death.
All laws against wickedness are ineffectual, unless some will inform, and some will prosecute; but till we mitigate the penalties for mere violations of property, information will always be hated, and prosecution dreaded. ”

“ When we turn to the criminal code we find arson laid down as a crime with the appropriate penalty. We find theft and murder denounced as crimes, and their appropriate penalty prescribed; and there, too, we find the last and highest of crimes,—treason. ”