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Article: Homicide, Definitions and Classifications of
- Article from:
- Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying
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Homicide, Definitions and Classifications of
Early legal codes, including English common law, defined homicide as the killing of a human being and included suicide. As the American legal system evolved, suicide was excluded and homicide became "the killing of one person by another" (Allen and Simonsen 1998, p. 615).
National and international definitions of homicide vary from society to society. Because most societies consider homicide to be the killing of one human being by another human being, both suicide and the murder of infrahuman beings (beings "lower" than humans) are excluded from the definition. The differentiation between abortion and homicide has not always been so ...