The categorical test is a legal standard for determining whether there has been adequate provocation to reduce a murder charge to voluntary manslaughter.
While murder and voluntary manslaughter are both intentional homicides, adequate provocation mitigates a defendant's culpability.
Adequate provocation is a legal requirement for a murder charge to be reduced to voluntary manslaughter.
[1] As early as the 1550s, cases appear in law reports that begin to develop the jurisprudence of manslaughter.
After this case, judges began to develop four common law "categories" of provocation:[2]