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Burden of proof is a legal duty that encompasses two connected but separate ideas that apply for establishing the truth of facts in a trial before tribunals in the United States: the "burden of production" and the "burden of persuasion." In a legal dispute, one party is initially presumed to be correct, while the other side bears the burden of producing evidence persuasive enough to establish the truth of facts needed to satisfy all the required legal elements of the dispute. There are varying types of burden of persuasion commonly referred to as standards of proof, and depending on the type of case, the standard of proof will be higher or lower. Burdens of persuasion and production may be of different standards for each party, in different phases of litigation. The burden of production is a minimal burden to produce at least enough evidence for the trier of fact to consider a disputed claim. After litigants have met the burden of production, they have the burden of persuasion: that enough evidence has been presented to persuade the trier of fact that their side is correct. There are different standards of persuasiveness ranging from a preponderance of the evidence, where there is just enough evidence to tip the balance, to proof beyond a reasonable doubt, as in United States criminal courts.
A prosecutor is a legal representative of the prosecution in states with either the common law adversarial system or the civil law inquisitorial system. The prosecution is the legal party responsible for presenting the case in a criminal trial against an individual accused of breaking the law. Typically, the prosecutor represents the state or the government in the case brought against the accused person.
Lon Tomohisa Horiuchi is an American former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) sniper and former United States Army officer who was involved in the 1992 Ruby Ridge standoff and 1993 Waco siege. In 1997, Horiuchi was charged with manslaughter for the death of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge, but the charges were later dropped.
A duty to rescue is a concept in tort law that arises in a number of cases, describing a circumstance in which a party can be held liable for failing to come to the rescue of another party who could face potential injury or death without being rescued. In common law systems, it is rarely formalized in statutes which would bring the penalty of law down upon those who fail to rescue. This does not necessarily obviate a moral duty to rescue: though law is binding and carries government-authorized sanctions and awarded civil penalties, there are also separate ethical arguments for a duty to rescue even where law does not punish failure to rescue.
An omission is a failure to act, which generally attracts different legal consequences from positive conduct. In the criminal law, an omission will constitute an actus reus and give rise to liability only when the law imposes a duty to act and the defendant is in breach of that duty. In tort law, similarly, liability will be imposed for an omission only exceptionally, when it can be established that the defendant was under a duty to act.
Self-defence is a defence permitting reasonable force to be used to defend one's self or another. This defence arises both from common law and the Criminal Law Act 1967. Self-defence is a justification defence rather than an excuse.
In the United States, self-defense is an affirmative defense that is used to justify the use of force by one person against another person under specific circumstances.
Murder is an offence under the common law of England and Wales. It is considered the most serious form of homicide, in which one person kills another with the intention to cause either death or serious injury unlawfully. The element of intentionality was originally termed malice aforethought, although it required neither malice nor premeditation. Baker, chapter 14 states that many killings done with a high degree of subjective recklessness were treated as murder from the 12th century right through until the 1974 decision in DPP v Hyam.
In English law, provocation was a mitigatory defence to murder which had taken many guises over generations many of which had been strongly disapproved and modified. In closing decades, in widely upheld form, it amounted to proving a reasonable total loss of control as a response to another's objectively provocative conduct sufficient to convert what would otherwise have been murder into manslaughter. It only applied to murder. It was abolished on 4 October 2010 by section 56(1) of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, but thereby replaced by the superseding—and more precisely worded—loss of control.
In the English law of homicide, manslaughter is a less serious offence than murder, the differential being between levels of fault based on the mens rea or by reason of a partial defence. In England and Wales, a common practice is to prefer a charge of murder, with the judge or defence able to introduce manslaughter as an option. The jury then decides whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. On conviction for manslaughter, sentencing is at the judge's discretion, whereas a sentence of life imprisonment is mandatory on conviction for murder. Manslaughter may be either voluntary or involuntary, depending on whether the accused has the required mens rea for murder.
Manslaughter is a common law legal term for homicide considered by law as less culpable than murder. The distinction between murder and manslaughter is sometimes said to have first been made by the ancient Athenian lawmaker Draco in the 7th century BC.
R v. Instan (1893) 1 QB 450 is an English criminal law manslaughter binding decision, confirming how the actus reus of that offence can be one of inactive negligence, as the common law is deemed by analogy (abstraction) to impose a basic duty of care onto an adult who voluntarily undertakes the regular care of another. Here, the patient was a relative, had known-to-the defendant gangrene and had in her home the funds for food to maintain both parties. Its jurisprudential explanations for how the common law is arrived at by such a research and analysis process, not in a vacuum, but rather by reference to strong moral obligations has been widely cited by other leading decisions. It is one of the many appeal-level decisions which inform the variety of acts and omissions sufficient to amount to the offence of gross negligence manslaughter, which subtly changes very slightly as society's codes of morality and professional contexts evolve.
People v. Berry is a voluntary manslaughter case that is widely taught in American law schools for the appellate court's unusual interpretation of heat of passion doctrine. Although the defendant had time to "cool down" between his wife's verbal admission of infidelity and the killing, the California Supreme Court held that the provocation in this case was adequate to reduce a murder charge to manslaughter. The lower court had relied on the traditional definition of "adequate provocation" in its jury instructions. The California Supreme Court reversed Berry's murder conviction, while affirming Berry's conviction for assault using deadly force.
Marta Russo was a 22-year-old student at the school of law at the Sapienza University of Rome, who was shot and killed within the university grounds. Her death was the centre of a complex court case that garnered huge media attention owing to the lack of substantial evidence and motive.
The omissions of individuals are generally not criminalised in English criminal law, save in many instances of a taking on of a duty of care, having contractual responsibility or clearly negligent creation of a hazard. Many comparator jurisdictions put a general statutory duty on strangers to rescue – this is not so in English law. Defenders and reasoners of the position regard it as wrong for the criminal law to punish people in many circumstances for committing no physical act, which it is argued would be an infringement on human autonomy. Academics arguing for reform argue that a social responsibility to assist others should exist, particularly where there would be no danger to the rescuer.
R v Hopley was an 1860 legal case in Eastbourne, Sussex, England. The case concerned the death of 15-year-old Reginald Cancellor at the hands of his teacher, Thomas Hopley. Hopley used corporal punishment with the stated intention of overcoming what he perceived as stubbornness on Cancellor's part, but instead beat the boy to death.
Brooke C. Wells is a federal magistrate judge for the United States District Court for the District of Utah. She was appointed to this position on June 4, 2003.
Lieutenant Colonel Justice John Harris Byrne, is the former Senior Judge Administrator of the Supreme Court of Queensland. Having been a judge of that court since 1989, he was one of the court's most experienced judges. He was also Chair of the National Judicial College of Australia, a body which provides programs and professional development resources to judicial officers in Australia. He is now a private Commercial Arbitrator.
English law contains homicide offences – those acts involving the death of another person. For a crime to be considered homicide, it must take place after the victim's legally recognised birth, and before their legal death. There is also the usually uncontroversial requirement that the victim be under the "Queen's peace". The death must be causally linked to the actions of the defendant. Since the abolition of the year and a day rule, there is no maximum time period between any act being committed and the victim's death, so long as the former caused the latter.
Conrad Henri Roy III was an American teenager who died by suicide at 18. His girlfriend, 17-year-old Michelle Carter, encouraged him in text messages to kill himself. The case was the subject of a notable investigation and involuntary manslaughter trial in Massachusetts, colloquially known as the "texting suicide case." Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter involved scores of text messages, emails, and phone calls recorded between Carter and Roy in the leadup to his death, in which Carter repeatedly texted Roy to kill himself. Roy had seen numerous mental health professionals and had been prescribed psychiatric medication. The case raised questions pertaining to the nature and limits of criminal responsibility. Lawrence Moniz, the judge assigned to Carter's criminal trial, concluded that Carter wanted Roy dead and that her words coerced him to kill himself. Carter was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, chiefly on the basis of her final phone call in which she ordered a scared Roy to go back inside his truck as it filled with carbon monoxide.
References
- ↑ People v. Beardsley, 150Mich.206 (1907).
- ↑ Jones v. United States , 308F.2d307 (D.C. Cir.1962).
- 1 2 3 4 Richard M. Bonnie; Anne M. Coughlin; John C. Jefferies, Jr.; Peter W. Low (1997). Criminal Law. Westbury, NY: The Foundation Press. pp. 92–93. ISBN 1-56662-448-7.
- 1 2 David C. Brody; James R. Acker; Wayne A. Logan (2001). (2000) Criminal Law - Google Book Search. ISBN 9780834210837 . Retrieved 2008-08-25.