as I explain it to you.
was charged with murder.
-77-
Well, as I said the accused
Murder as it has been defined
is where a person of sound memory and discretion
unlawfully kills a reasonable creature in being under
the Queen's peace with malice aforethought express or
implied and death following within a year or a day.
All those are ingredients that the Crown must prove to
your satisfaction. It is the unprovoked killing of a
human being without lawful excuse, with the intention
either to kill or to cause serious bodily harm, really
serious bodily harm.
So then, the person must be of sound mind and
discretion. A lunatic or an idiot is not a person of
sound mind and discretion, so if you find that the
accused is an idiot, or a lunatic to begin with, the
case is finished. Then he has to unlawfully kill.
The killing cannot be what's called a justifiable
killing or an excusable killing. A justifiable
killing is for instance
an execution, the hangman has to
carry out an order to hang a person, that person can't be
called a murderer, that is lawful killing, that's his
job, and there are other instances of justifiable
killing which I need not go into; and the excusable
killing is like if you have an accidental death where
the person was doing quite a lawful act and something
happened, and you can also have it in the case where
you might come to it in this case, what's called self-
defence, where a person kills another in self-defence
that will be excusable.
Now in this case what the Crown wants to ask you
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