WHEN “HOMICIDE” IS NOT “MURDER”
January 25, 2015
The central page-one headline in
today’s New York Times reads: “Twist in 97-Year-Old’s Murder: His Knifing Was 5
Decades Ago.” To medical examiners,
“homicides” come in many forms. It is a
common-law rule in the US that a homicide can no longer be criminal when death
happens more than a year and a day after the injury. Nonetheless, the NYT reports that two NYPD
detectives have “pored over” records, searching for witnesses, and “have found
no leads so far.” The loose usage of the
term “murder” in the Sunday Times headline illustrates the arbitrariness of defining
murder itself, and more broadly, the limits of assigning personal, let alone
collective, blame for violence. Love and
peace, hal
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