Murder and homicide in the United States

SIGNIFICANCE: It is generally accepted that no other human act is as serious as homicide—the taking of another person’s life. In its criminal form, homicide challenges the criminal justice system to perform at its maximum efficiency, as such crimes cause intense fear and anxiety throughout society. Moreover, the standards that must be met to execute persons convicted of criminal homicide, or murder, are the highest in the American criminal justice system.

There has never been a period in recorded history when homicide was not considered the most serious and troubling of human behaviors. The killing of one person by another has consistently been regarded as an example of the ancient principle of malum in se ("wrong in itself"), a behavior that is considered inherently wrong, independent of the law, in contrast to a behavior that is considered wrong as a matter of good social order, such as running a red light.

The greatest numbers of intentional killings have occurred in military combat and are not legally defined as criminal. The American criminal justice system is most concerned about clearly illegal killings. Moreover, probably no other crime is as frequently—or inaccurately—portrayed in novels, television shows, and films as criminal homicide.

Varieties of Homicide

“Homicide” is a general term for the causing of one person’s death by another. Not all homicides are considered criminal. However, the term is often inaccurately used to describe specific types of illegal killings, such as murder. Homicides are generally classified under two broad categories: nonfelonious and felonious.

Most state criminal codes consider nonfelonious homicides to be either excusable or justifiable in nature. Excusable killings generally involve elements of fault, but the actions are not sufficient to be judged as criminal. Examples of excusable homicides include accidental shootings and car accidents that do not involve gross negligence or the intent to harm.

Justifiable homicides differ from excusable homicides in involving intent, while also being considered legal by society. Examples include state-ordered executions, shooting of criminal suspects who pose clear and immediate threats to life, and the killing of enemy soldiers in wars.

By contrast, felonious homicides are always considered illegal and are often generically referred to as criminal homicides. Many states broadly subdivide criminal homicides into murder and manslaughter, but some jurisdictions prefer to classify illegal killings by numerical degrees, such as murder in the first or second degree. Contrary to popular belief, most criminal homicides are not, by definition, “murders.” Most definitions of murder in legal codes require the element of premeditation, which is often termed a design to kill or malice aforethought.

Criminal homicides that lack premeditation are commonly known as manslaughter. Like murder, manslaughter is always illegal. It differs in lacking premeditated intent. Most criminal homicides committed in the United States fall under the classification of manslaughter, not premeditated murder.

History of Homicide

Descriptions of criminal homicide can be found in the earliest records of human societies. Early Greek verse and Roman theater often selected murder as a central dramatic theme. Most sacred religious foundation sources also contain many examples of homicide, as evidenced by numerous accounts of murder in the Bible and the Qurān. Modern laws defining criminal homicide are the products of many hundreds of years of legal evolution. In some parts of the world—such as the Muslim world—legal systems incorporate religious sources to define and punish those who kill. Most modern legal systems have separated religion from their homicide codes.

Within the United States, most states and the federal government have modeled their homicide statutes on early English common law. In 1500, English law defined murder as the sole form of criminal homicide; the crime of manslaughter emerged nearly fifty years later.

The first reported murder in England’s North American colonies occurred in 1630. John Billington, a member of the original band of Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower a decade earlier, was tried and executed for the firearm death of a neighbor. However, many believe the first American murder case to attract national attention was committed in 1849 by John Webster, a Harvard University professor of chemistry. Convicted of killing a local physician within his campus laboratory, Webster became the first subject of a long line of celebrity murder cases to draw intense media coverage. The Webster case also was one of the earliest murder investigations to use forensic science identification, as the murder victim’s false teeth were found in the ashes of his killer’s furnace and identified by a dentist.

Other historic American criminal homicides include John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and the Lizzie Borden case. Lincoln’s killing was the first successful assassination attempt on an American president. His murder was part of a conspiracy that also unsuccessfully targeted Lincoln’s vice president and secretary of state. The 1892 murder trial of Lizzie Borden ranks as one of the most sensational criminal cases of the nineteenth century. The defendant’s father and stepmother were killed in their Fall River, Massachusetts, home by repeated axe blows. Despite considerable circumstantial evidence against her, Borden was acquitted in a jury trial.

Criminal homicide by mob action, known as lynching, became frequent during the late 1880s and continued into the first decades of the twentieth century. The so-called lynching era produced an estimated three thousand to four thousand mob homicides—mostly African American men murdered by White mobs.

While the vast majority of early twentieth century criminal homicides were not sensational, that era is notable for a wave of killings linked to organized crime. The gangster decade, which extended from the mid-1920s through the 1930s, saw hundreds of homicides, many of which were linked to territorial rivalries among the gangs. The illegal sale of alcohol during Prohibition, and the emergence of organized narcotics trafficking often fueled gangster homicides.

Among the most sensational murder cases of that era that were not linked to organized crime was that of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, who murdered a Chicago newspaper delivery boy during the early 1920s simply in an effort to demonstrate their supposed intellectual superiority by committing a perfect crime. Their case generated exceptional media interest because of their wealthy backgrounds, their youth, and because they were defended by the country’s most famous attorney, Clarence Darrow.

Another celebrated murder case grew out of the 1932 kidnapping of the twenty-month-old son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh. The kidnapped baby was eventually found murdered, and the later trial and conviction of Bruno Hauptmann for the crime generated so much public interest that his case was dubbed the “trial of the century.”

The later part of the twentieth century produced several unique trends in criminal homicide. Killings linked to youth gangs and drug dealing peaked in the 1980s, and the phenomena of serial and mass murder became a subject of public fascination.

The late twentieth century saw a number of new sensational murder cases, whose notoriety was magnified by the new medium of television broadcasting. In 1954, for example, the Ohio physician Sam Sheppard was convicted of killing his wife in a suburb of Cleveland. His case fulfilled all the requisite elements of a celebrity homicide trial: a wealthy couple, sex scandal, and vicious violence.

During the mid-1990s, the entire nation was transfixed by the prosecution of former football star O. J. Simpson, who was tried for the murders of his former wife and one of her friends. Simpson’s case was the first televised example of a sensational double murder trial of national interest. Watched by millions of viewers over several months, the case set a new benchmark in the expanding trend of televising criminal homicides. Although Simpson was found not guilty of the murder of his former wife and her friend, he was found liable for their deaths in a civil trial two years later.

In the twenty-first century, acts of terrorism, beginning with the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, took center stage in the public imagination, as did the increasing trend of mass shootings, starting with the Columbine High School massacre of 1999 in Colorado. Mass shootings committed with automatic weapons spiked in frequency in the 2010s and 2020s, especially in schools. In 2012, twenty-year-old Adam Lanza killed twenty children and six adults in the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In 2022, eighteen-year-old Salvador Ramos murdered nineteen children and two teachers in the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Lanza took his own life after the shootings and Ramos was shot and killed by law officials. Nikolas Cruz killed seventeen people during the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day in 2018. Cruz was apprehended after the shooting and ultimately sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. The deadliest mass shooting in US history, the Las Vegas shooting of 2017, occurred when Stephen Paddock opened fire on a country music festival with automatic weapons, set a record with sixty victims killed.

Prevalence

Within the United States, 21,156 criminal homicides (murder and non-negligent manslaughter) were recorded in 2022. This figure was much higher than past rates. Notably, a record-setting spike in the national murder rate was seen in 2020, with more than 21,000 incidents recorded (or 7.8 homicides per 100,000 people, up from about 6 in 2019), leading experts to debate potential causes. Many observers hypothesized the spike may have been linked to the social impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and rising tensions over police brutality. The number of homicides dropped by about 2,000 in 2023 compared to 2022.

Contrary to popular opinion, the United States does not have one of the highest criminal homicide rates in the world. Many countries have significantly more illegal killings in proportion to their populations than the United States, particularly in Central and South America. Interpol and the United Nations track international homicide rates, but the rates of some countries may be significantly underreported as a result of fragmented justice systems and other data collection problems, such as differing definitions of homicide and murder.

The frequency of a specific crime can be determined in any of three basic ways: reported rates, victimization surveys, and self-report surveys. Of the various felonies known to police, criminal homicide is considered to be the one that is most accurately reported. Few criminal homicides go undiscovered or unreported. This conclusion is confirmed by victimization and self-report surveys. Moreover, it is believed that nearly all victims of attempted murders report the attempts to authorities.

Homicide trends documented by annual Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports point to the South as having the highest regional rate of criminal homicide. Criminal homicide primarily involves adults, as juvenile homicides rarely exceed 8 to 10 percent of the annual totals. Homicides are most common in large metropolitan areas and tend to peak during the summer months. Increased rates are also observed during holiday periods and on weekends—possible indications of the influence of alcohol and leisure time upon violent behavior.

The overwhelming majority of both victims and perpetrators of criminal homicide are male. Killers and their victims are also overwhelmingly likely to be members of the same racial or ethnic group. Homicides are particularly high in both Hispanic and African American communities. Indeed, criminal homicide is a leading cause of death among African American men between the ages fifteen and thirty-four, according to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) statistics. Black Americans aged eighteen to thirty-four are nine times more likely than White Americans to be victims of homicide, while Black Americans aged thirty-five to sixty-four and five times more likely.

The majority of homicide victims know their killers, with an estimated 70 percent to 80 percent of all victims having had at least some acquaintance with their killers. However, the rate of stranger-to-stranger killings has steadily risen since the mid-1970s. Firearms are not a necessary component of criminal homicide, but in the 2010s they were used in over two-thirds of such cases. Handguns are used particularly often.

Special Aspects of Criminal Homicide

Serial criminal homicide—the killing of multiple victims at different locations over a period of time—is a popular subject in fictional media but is statistically rare in real life. The FBI has estimated that about thirty serial killers may be operating in the United States at any given time. Mass murder is another rare form of criminal homicide. This form of criminal homicide involves the killing of two or more victims, usually at the same place during a short time frame. Despite a documented increase in mass shootings in the twenty-first century, mass murder still remained relatively uncommon.

Studies have found residential kitchens and bedrooms to be particularly common sites of homicide, possibly due to the frequency of arguments in those rooms and the ready availability of lethal weapons. Although the majority of illegal killings occur in residences, criminal homicides in workplaces are common too. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that from between 400 and 500 workplace homicides are typically recorded per year in the United States, accounting for around 9 percent of all fatal occupational injuries.

While many factors can cause a criminal homicide, most occur as a consequence of emotional disputes or heated arguments among acquaintances or family members. Individuals who kill their relatives often have records of domestic violence against their victims that have required past police contact. Outside families, many emotional disputes leading to homicide develop in bars and similar social gathering places. About half of criminal homicide cases are connected with alcohol use.

Investigation

Because of the universally recognized seriousness of criminal homicide, standard comprehensive methods of investigating such crimes are routinely followed by police. According to 2022 data from the FBI, US law enforcement agencies successfully cleared (meaning solved) 52.3 percent of all reported criminal homicides. This was down from 64.1 percent in 2013.

Ideally, homicide investigations are completed in the shortest possible time to avoid possible problems with witnesses or alteration of evidence. However, cases often drag on for indefinite periods. Because of the obvious importance of homicide, criminal homicide is one of the few crimes exempted from state and federal statute of limitation rules. Such rules normally prohibit the arrest or prosecution of suspects after specified periods of time have passed—usually three to five years after crimes are reported to police.

When criminal homicides are discovered or reported to police, a comprehensive series of investigative procedures are immediately set into motion. Homicide investigations and judicial prosecution are often lengthy and expensive and have the potential to cause strains between communities and their police. When homicide investigations fail to produce arrests and when suspects are unsuccessfully prosecuted, public concern over the effectiveness of the police and courts rises.

Every year, millions of Americans die from a variety of causes. While most die as a result of illnesses or accidents, about 16,000 meet their deaths through criminal causation. Most criminal homicides are of the manslaughter variety—killings that lack premeditation. The remaining criminal homicides are generally termed murders because they possess elements that indicate planning, or premeditation, to kill that can be demonstrated by the criminal justice system through investigation. Since nearly 80 percent of all Americans die outside established care institutions, such as hospitals, the first step in all homicide investigative processes is to determine whether police involvement is necessary.

Deaths may be grouped under four general classifications: natural, accidental, suicidal, and homicidal. Police investigators may be involved initially at the scenes of all four types of death, extended investigations generally center upon only homicide cases. Moreover, police investigators deal mainly with illegal killings generically termed criminal homicides.

Virtually all types of police officers—whether uniformed officers or plainclothes detectives—can be involved in homicide investigations. In large and medium-sized law-enforcement agencies, cases are often initially investigated by uniformed patrol officers, who are generally the first to arrive at crime scenes. After these officers determine that the scenes involve suspicious deaths, they generally summon specialized homicide detectives.

Because the majority of illegal killings occur in large metropolitan areas served by large police departments, most criminal homicides are investigated by specially trained police detectives. In contrast, criminal homicides in small towns and rural areas are often investigated by local police with the assistance of state police. Medical and forensic assistance is routinely requested in the course of the homicide investigations. Such expertise is required to help establish various facts regarding the nature of the death and painstakingly to process physical evidence commonly found at violent crime scenes.

Investigations of criminal homicide are retroactive discovery processes: They take place after the criminal acts and work backward in time in their attempts to reconstruct relevant facts. As in all major criminal investigations, homicide investigators seek to answer the six classic questions of criminal events: who, what, where, why, when, and how. Three general areas of inquiry are particularly significant to the homicide investigations: motive, opportunity, and means.

Homicide cases fall into two broad categories; known and unknown investigations. Known cases involve identified suspects, and their investigative efforts focus on gathering evidence to confirm the primary assumptions, while building evidence for prosecution of the suspects. Unknown cases provide the classic challenge to the homicide investigator; their perpetrators’ identities are not immediately known and must be discovered and linked to the homicides. Investigations involve three primary areas of inquiry: the deceased, the crime scenes, and the results of medical and forensic examinations.

The Deceased

The bodies of homicide victims can reveal much to trained investigators, including the victims’ identity, the time of death, the nature and extent of wounds, the victims’ occupations, the possible motives for the killings, and a host of other information.

When police encounter an apparently deceased victim at a crime scene, they must never assume the victim is necessarily dead. Many medical conditions and accidents can simulate death, such as shock, immersion in frigid water, drugs, and electric shock. Accordingly, only trained medical and emergency-care personnel are qualified formally to pronounce death.

After the fact of death is legally confirmed, every effort is made to identify the deceased. This task is easily accomplished in many cases because of the presence of identifying documents and statements of witnesses. However, the task can present formidable investigative challenges when nothing can be found at a scene to identify a victim. Persons who cannot be easily identified are often victims of stranger-to-stranger homicides. In such cases, missing-person reports are reviewed, fingerprints and dental impressions are compared, and DNA samples are obtained for possible matches in state and national databases. In cases in which the remains are in advanced states of decomposition, anthropological techniques can be used to create identifiable likenesses through skull analysis, and skeletal remains are analyzed to yield information about the victims’ age, race, gender, past injures, and other identifying features.

Time-of-death determinations are routinely attempted in most criminal homicide investigations. Such findings may later prove significant in corroborating or disputing alibis or reveal details of the victims’ movements immediately prior to death. In contrast to media portrayals, however, determining how long a person has been dead is far from an exact science. In most cases, expert medical opinion can estimate death only within time frames of from five to ten hours.

Many methods are used to approximate time of death, including assessments of the extent of rigor mortis and postmortem lividity. Rigor mortis is an after-death chemical change within the muscles that causes a stiffening process that develops at a known rate. Postmortem lividity involves the settling of blood due to gravity after cessation of cardiac activity. As the blood settles, distinct skin color patterns are noted as time passes. Although these methods are useful, neither is particularly accurate. Cooling rates are far more useful. Because the temperatures of dead bodies adjust to the temperatures of their surroundings at known rates, measurement of body temperatures can be used to calculate rates of heat loss, which can be used to produce comparatively accurate estimates of the moments of death. However, after bodies reach the temperatures of their surrounding, this technique cannot be used.

Accurate knowledge of the causes of homicides is of great investigative value. Establishment of the true cause of a death can justify a criminal investigation, alert society to an accident or suicide pattern, reveal leads to the identity of a perpetrator who uses a recognizable method of killing, and affect insurance claims and will settlements.

The first task of investigations is to rule out natural, accidental, or suicidal causes of death. Such determinations are often made by establishing causes of death through detailed examinations of wounds. Although it rarely happens in real life, killers and even their victims sometimes attempt to stage scenes to make the causes of death appear to be other than what they really are. For example, persons who die by suicide may stage their deaths so they will appear to be accidental. Conversely, a killer may try to alter a scene to make a murder appear to be a suicide.

Other facts that can assist police in determining causes of death may include evidence of other persons who have been present at the death scenes, the numbers and locations of wounds, the presence or absence of physical struggles, the psychological and criminal backgrounds of the victims, and analyses of motives, opportunities, and means. Since most suicides and criminal homicides are perpetrated with firearms, edged weapons, and various forms of asphyxia, homicide investigators must be knowledgeable in all these areas.

Crime Scenes

Most homicides contain large quantities of evidence. Because such scenes generally involve physical struggles, obvious and trace evidence is likely be present. Since it is probable that physiological evidence linked to victims and perpetrators is present, great care must be taken not to contaminate such evidence. Most illegal killings are not planned and premeditated murders but the results of arguments that escalate to someone’s death. Killers who do not plan murders in advance are almost certain to leave behind such trace evidence as fingerprints or body tissues or fluids containing DNA evidence.

Processing of homicide scenes is conducted in three major phases: recording, searching, and packaging evidence. After a death is confirmed and a scene is protected from contamination and alteration, all possible relevant information about it must be recorded. This is generally accomplished through still photography and video recording. Later analyses of visual recordings can assist judges and juries and may also provide investigative leads not apparent at the time when the scenes were first processed.

After recording is completed, thorough searches of the immediate and external areas follow. Although a homicide may occur entirely within a single room, the entire surrounding structure and area should be searched, as criminals often discard evidence as they enter and exit the scenes of their crimes. Extensive neighborhood canvasses are then conducted to locate witnesses who may provide leads to suspects, vehicle descriptions, and insights into times of death based on what they may have seen or heard. They may also provide background data on victims that can assist in establishing motives. As evidence is located, it is recovered, marked, and packaged for subsequent examination by police and specially trained crime scene investigators.

Finally, evidence is transported to local, state, or federal crime labs for analysis. Generally the police investigators determine which specific tests should be performed at the labs on specified items. For this reason, investigators must be knowledgeable about the forensic tests that are available and the particular results that can be obtained from them, even though they do not actually perform the laboratory tests themselves.

Medical Expertise

Homicide investigations nearly always utilize medical expertise. Physicians who specialize in the examination of suspicious deaths and who frequently perform postmortem autopsies are properly termed forensic pathologists. Approximately five hundred doctors in the United States are trained in this field. Many of them hold government positions as coroners and medical examiners. The medical examiner system was originated in Massachusetts in 1877 and is the more recent of the two systems. Medical examiners are almost always forensic pathologists. Some coroners are physicians, but many are simply elected county officials who lack medical backgrounds.

Medical expertise assists the homicide investigator in specifying cause of death and determining if the cause was due to criminal means. They can determine the number and severity of wounds, estimate time of death, and provide investigative leads relating to motive and means. Forensic pathologists also assist in cases when it is necessary to disinter a body previously buried; known as exhumation.

Prosecution

The crime of murder is one over which the states usually have jurisdiction, and it is typically prosecuted by states unless the crime has occurred on federal territory or against a federal officer or agent. Federal prosecutions for murder typically derive from violation of specific congressional legislation protecting federal interests or involving matters of interstate concern. Each state adopts its own statutes proscribing criminal conduct and establishes its own rules of criminal procedure, subject only to the limitation that such law must meet constitutional standards. Thus the definitions of murder and manslaughter, the punishments imposed on those convicted, and the procedural steps from arrest to conviction, sentencing, and imprisonment differ somewhat among the various states.

The decision whether to prosecute a suspect for murder rests with the local prosecutor within the jurisdiction in which the crime occurred. The prosecutor has the discretion to reject cases when available evidence to prove guilt is weak, and the prosecutor may decline to file a case even when police have recommended that charges be brought. When this discretion is abused by local prosecutors, state authorities may intervene. However, when both the local and state prosecutors decline to go forward for improper reasons or when a jury fails to convict a defendant in a murder case under suspicious circumstances, federal prosecutors may seek to file charges under federal statutes such as those making it unlawful to deprive a person of civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution. This type of intervention has been employed when local authorities have declined to prosecute or juries have failed to convict White persons accused of murdering Black Americans, for example.

Murder prosecutions are conducted procedurally like other felony prosecutions, and the same constitutional safeguards apply. Nevertheless, the consequences to society and to the defendant—especially in murder cases in which capital punishment is a sentencing option—are so great that exceptional efforts are typically expended by both sides to contest all legal and factual issues. Usually, the most experienced prosecutors and defense attorneys try murder cases.

All criminal cases have a corpus delicti, which literally means the “body of a crime.” In a murder prosecution, it is a reference to more than the deceased victim’s corpse. It is evidence of the components of the crime: evidence that the victim is actually dead, that the death was caused by the criminal act of another, and, in some jurisdictions, that the defendant is that criminal. The importance of the corpus delicti rule, which is of practical significance primarily in murder cases, is that a conviction cannot rely upon the uncorroborated out-of-court statement or admission of the accused. The prosecution must offer additional evidence to establish the corpus delicti in order to obtain a conviction. Of course, a plea of guilt or other confession made in court is ordinarily sufficient to prove the corpus delicti and to support a conviction in a murder prosecution.

Punishment

Murder is punished by imprisonment, sometimes for life without possibility of parole, and in some cases by death. Criminal sentencing is usually left up to the discretion of the judge, within guidelines set by statute, even in cases tried before a jury. Some states, however, require that the jury determine or participate in the determination of whether capital punishment should be imposed. Many state statutes declare that the death penalty is proper only when certain aggravating factors occur during the crime. Those who oppose capital punishment contend that it is imposed arbitrarily, has little deterrent effect, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Nevertheless, most polls consistently indicate that the majority of Americans support the use of the death penalty (even amid widespread concerns about its application), and the Supreme Court has upheld the validity of properly drafted death-penalty legislation against constitutional challenges.

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