LEGAL OPINIONS ON MURDER.

Southland Times, Volume III, Issue 272, 1 June 1866, Page 3

LEGAL OPINIONS ON MURDER.

If the eminent men who were examined by the Eoyal Commission on Capital Punishment were agreed upon what murder is as the the moralist regards it, they differed in their definition of the crime in its legal aspects. Lord Cranworth says, whenever any person is committing an act of violence which he knows may probably result in death, and he nevertheless prosecutes that violence, and it does result in death, that must be considered a premeditated murder. He thinks it would be very wrong if an intention to kill were considered necessary. Mr. Avory, the clerk of arraigns at the Central Criminal Court, considered it would be murder if an officer of justice going to enforce the law were killed through being pushed down stairs and striking against some obstruction at the bottom. Mr J. Eitzjames Stephen narrated a case in which three lads were sentenced to death for the fatal consequences of a blow which one of them struck an old gentleman, in order to make him stoop forward, so that the others might snatch his Avatch from his pocket. Serjeant Parry, on the other hand, describes his idea of a murder to be "a. prepared murder— prepared and planned beforehand." "I reject," he added, " anyjj definition of murder which would include a man in a sudden burst of passion killing another. I say that this is not, and ought not to be, murder." When a woman giving birth to a natural child kills it in order to conceal the birth, Lord Cranworth would hardly say that any one is murdered, "It, i s rather as if the child never came into the world than that, having come into it, it is murdered." The question naturally arose, if it is not murder in the mother's case, would it be murder in the midwife's or the father's? Lord Cranworth was decided upon this. The mother, he said, has influence operating on her which cannot affect any other person ; Bhe .is hardly conscious of her acts — hardly a responsible agent. Mr Walpole, staking the same view, was careful to add, the influences were those arising from the, consideration of illegitimacy. The killing of a legitimate child he would still wish to be regarded as murder. — Daily News. — — ■ *