Murder in United States law

Recently, the Supreme Court, in the McGirt decision, reaffirmed that major crimes within the reservation boundaries of Native American tribes, for which a tribal member is suspected, must be investigated and prosecuted by the federal, not state, government.

In addition, murder by a member of the United States Armed Forces of a prisoner while under custody of the United States Armed Forces is in violation of Article 118 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and can result in the perpetrator being tried by a general court-martial, subjecting to certain types of jurisdictions within its own borders or with foreign nations.

Jurisdiction over the crime of murder can be complex as a result of the principle of "dual sovereignty" that is part of federalism.

In cases where a murder involves both state and federal jurisdiction, the offender can be tried and punished separately for each crime without raising issues of double jeopardy, unless the court believes that the new prosecution is merely a "sham" forwarded by the prior prosecutor.

The English common law, which had been received into the laws of the U.S. states, at the time applied capital punishment to a large number of crimes; as a result, states statutorily divided the crime of murder into first and second degrees, and began applying capital punishment only to criminals convicted of first-degree murder.

[83] Remedies were limited to criminal penalties for the assault on the mother and tort action for loss of the anticipated economic services of the lost child, for emotional pain and suffering, or both.

With the widespread adoption of laws protecting unborn life, the assailant could be charged with that offense, but the penalty was often only a fine and a few days in jail.

[92] In Florida, a person is guilty of first-degree murder when it is perpetrated from a premeditated design to result in the death of a human being.

A person is also guilty of first-degree murder if they cause the death of any individual during the commission of a predicate felony regardless of actual intent or premeditation.

[96][97] The nineteen enumerated categories of felonies falling under first-degree murder rather than third-degree murder are drug trafficking; arson; sexual battery; robbery; burglary; kidnapping; prison escape; aggravated child abuse; aggravated abuse of an elderly person or disabled adult; aircraft piracy; unlawful distribution of cocaine, opium, or other controlled substances when such drug is proven to be the proximate cause of the death of the user; carjacking; home-invasion robbery; aggravated stalking; murder of another human being; unlawful throwing, placing, or discharging of a destructive device or bomb; aggravated fleeing or eluding with serious bodily injury or death; resisting an officer with violence to his or her person; or terrorism or an act in furtherance of terrorism.

[98][99] A first-degree murder involves one or more specific elements: Louisiana states homicide in the third-degree is manslaughter.

[101] Minnesota law originally defined third-degree murder solely as depraved-heart murder ("without intent to effect the death of any person, caus[ing] the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life").

[102][103] In 1987, an additional drug-related provision ("without intent to cause death, proximately caus[ing] the death of a human being by, directly or indirectly, unlawfully selling, giving away, bartering, delivering, exchanging, distributing, or administering a controlled substance classified in Schedule I or II") was added to the definition of third-degree murder.

A legal scholar writing in 1953 (by which time this level of division had been abolished) described this as the "all-time 'record'" for dividing murder into degrees.

[16] The definitions were as follows: In the 1884 Compiled Laws of New Mexico, third-degree murder included assisting a suicide (§ 696), killing of an unborn child by injury to the mother (§ 697), administration of abortifacient causing death of an unborn child or its mother (§ 698), unintentional killing of a human being in the heat of passion in a cruel or unusual manner (§ 699), and unintentional death caused by an intoxicated physician (§ 701).

In general, Pennsylvania courts have ruled that the standard of "malice" required for a conviction of third-degree murder is the same as that required for aggravated assault: not just "ordinary negligence" nor "mere recklessness", but "a higher degree of culpability, i.e., that which considers and then disregards the threat necessarily posed to human life by the offending conduct".

[116] The crime known as drug delivery resulting in death[117] had originally been classified as another form of third-degree murder under Pennsylvania law.

In Commonwealth v. Ludwig (2005), the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania ruled that this meant that conviction for the crime required the same element of malice as in any other third-degree murder.

For example, the 1849 Revised Statutes defined third-degree murder as a killing "perpetrated without any design to effect the death, by a person engaged in the commission of any felony".

[124] However, in October 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that execution could no longer be used as a penalty for any crime.