Today’s speaker was John Beaumont, a criminal lawyer, who gave us a very entertaining and informative talk, entitled “Murder most Foul”.
The phrase apparently emanates from Shakespeare’s play ,Hamlet, and it has also prompted quotes such as “Let’s kill all the lawyers”. Bankers and estate agents have now apparently joined this unsavoury group!
He enlightened us all by explaining the differences between murder and manslaughter, where murder is the intention to kill a born human being, who is actually out of the body of its birth mother.
Manslaughter, on the other hand, though very much akin to murder, depends to a much greater degree on the state of mind of the offender.
Numbers of incidents tend to be quite stable, though can be affected by single incidents involving many casualties, for example the Harold Shipman murders, or the Hillsborough tragedy.
Women are most generally killed by people they know, and the most vulnerable people are children under the age of 12 months
Offenders are likely to hope for a verdict of manslaughter which carry a sentence of a maximum of life imprisonment, whereas murder attracts an automatic whole life sentence. A semantic difference!
Whatever the crime, proof that it happened is vital, and this is often very difficult to achieve.