Céline Graciet is a freelance English to French translator with a nice website, Naked Translations, and weblog. One of her specialities is subtitling, but she translates in many other areas too. Her manipulation of Movable Type certainly looks a lot better than mine!

Meanwhile, I hope that Gail of Openbrackets is OK. The last we heard, the floodwaters were approaching up her lawn.

(Click on picture to enlarge)

No, I’m afraid I won’t be able to go – I’ve got a deadline.

This is a very brief note, following from the comments on the earlier entry.

Looking at the definitions is not enough – you need to look at textbooks too. Really, legal translation seems like reinventing the wheel every time. Maybe there are Dr. Phil. theses out there comparing the various criminal offences in common law and German systems. Comparative law books tend to give criminal law short shrift.

Anyway, the English and German definitions are both weird, but the courts have developed complex systems of assessing homicide based on those definitions.

The German definition dates from 1942 or thereabouts. Before then, the definition of murder was based on premeditation. It must have been more similar to the English definition.

This German definition defines not murder but ‘the murderer’. It is based on the idea that people can be fundamentally bad. It is also based on evil acts. Thus if you kill someone who is asleep, you are acting heimtückisch – treacherously – and it is murder.

In English law, malice aforethought means the form of mens rea (subjektiver Tatbestand) that makes something murder. It doesn’t imply cold-blooded premeditation. If you kill someone in a fight and just before killing you want either to kill him or to hurt him very seriously, that is murder in English law – but I don’t think it is in German law. It would be the equivalent of voluntary manslaughter there.

In English law, there are defences and justifications. In German law, there are also defences and justifications. In both systems, you can be incapable of murder for reasons of age or mental state.

What I don’t know is the significance in the present case of the part of the German definition of murder ‘to satisfy his sexual desires’. Would this be enough, even with the consent of the victim? I would need to know more about German law to answer that.

Perhaps a comparison will be made somewhere in the next weeks.

I am just going to put a few facts down here because I haven’t got time to research much right now.

bq. Strafgesetzbuch § 211. Mord. (1) Der Mörder wird mit lebenslanger Freiheitsstrafe bestraft.
(2) Mörder ist, wer
aus Mordlust, zur Befriedigung des Geschlechtstriebs, aus Habgier oder sonst aus niedrigen Beweggründen,
heimtückisch oder grausam oder mit gemeingefährlichen Mitteln oder
um eine andere Straftat zu ermöglichen oder zu verdecken,
einen Menschen tötet.
§ 212. Totschlag. (1) Wer einen Menschen tötet, ohne Mörder zu sein, wird als Totschläger mit Freiheitsstrafe nicht unter fünf Jahren bestraft.
(2) In besonders schweren Fällen ist auf lebenslange Freiheitsstrafe zu erkennen.
§ 213. Minder schwerer Fall des Totschlags. War der Totschläger ohne eigene Schuld durch eine ihm oder einem Angehörigen zugefügte Mißhandlung oder schwee Beleidigung von dem getöteten Menschen zum Zorn gereizt und hierdurch auf der Stelle zur Tat hingerissen worden oder liegt sonst ein minder schwerer Fall vor, so ist die Strafe Freiheitsstrafe von einem Jahr bis zu zehn Jahren.
§ 216 Tötung auf Verlangen. (1) Ist jemand durch das ausdrückliche und ernstliche Verlangen des Getöteten zur Tötung bestimmt worden, so ist auf Freiheitsstrafe von sechs Monaten bis zu fünf Jahren zu erkennen.
(2) Der Versuch ist strafbar.

Translation from German Federal Ministry of Justice – also available at German Law Archive:

bq. Section 211 Murder
(1) The murderer shall be punished with imprisonment for life.
(2) A murderer is, whoever kills a human being out of murderous lust, to satisfy his sexual desires, from greed or otherwise base motives, treacherously or cruelly or with means dangerous to the public or in order to make another crime possible or cover it up.
Section 212 Manslaughter
(1) Whoever kills a human being without being a murderer, shall be punished for manslaughter with imprisonment for not less than five years.
(2) In especially serious cases imprisonment for life shall be imposed.
Section 213 Less Serious Case of Manslaughter
If the person committing manslaughter was provoked to rage by maltreatment inflicted on him or a relative or a serious insult by the person killed and was thereby immediately torn to commit the act, or in the event of an otherwise less serious case, the punishment shall be imprisonment from one year to ten years.
Section 214, 215 (repealed)
Section 216 Homicide upon Request
(1) If someone is induced to homicide by the express and earnest request of the person killed, then imprisonment from six months to five years shall be imposed.
(2) An attempt shall be punishable.

bq. England and Wales.
Murder is unlawful homicide with malice aforethought.
The actus reus of homicide is killing a human being under the Queen’s peace.

bq. USA
In the USA, most states divide murder into first-degree murder and second-degree murder. In some states, first-degree murder carries the death penalty.
These are both murder, so both require malice aforethought.
First-degree murder is usally defined as a murder that was wilful (US willful), deliberate and premeditated, often called murder in cold blood; murder caused by the use of poison, torture, explosives or ambush; or killings committed in the course of certain felonies, usually arson, burglary, robbery, rape and mayhem.

Like Sasha Volokh, I don’t usually like these Internet / weblog quizzes, but this one is amusing. (Originally via Quare).

I am William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the Fifth Duke of Portland!

bq. renowned as the finest judge of horseflesh in England, you took the tradition of aristocratic eccentricity to unprecedented heights. Having inherited the stately home of Welbeck Abbey, you proceeded to construct miles of underground tunnels and a ballroom, in pink, beneath it. The ballroom was complete except for one small detail. It had no floor. Despite this vast home, you lived exclusively in a suite of five rooms, each one also pink.

I remained unmarried, after being turned down by an opera singer, but I cared about the welfare of my servants and even helped them muck out the stables. However, if my servants met me in the corridor, they were to ignore me while I froze on the spot until they were out of sight. I made sure there was a chicken roasting at all times so I could sneak into the kitchen for a snack.

rogue semiotics (via the Guardian Weblog) had a post commenting on the weird names used by spammers:

bq. This morning I had offers of genuine prescribed medication from, amongst others, Demetrius Column, Arnulfo Mcleod and the titanically monickered Inflorescence B. Afghan.

Jon speculates whether these come from the heirs of the French surrealists.

To quote a comment from Chuck Lawson:

bq. Of course, we probably should have figured out that Magritte’s grandson was involved when messages started appearing with “This is not a spam!” prominently displayed at the bottom…

Or ‘Do not read this fax!’, of course.

I regularly empty the trash in my Eudora. These are all the names I can offer at the moment: Zaida Coxum, Young Alford, Jernigan Fletcher, Yesenia Hopkins, Kermit Clinton, Genaro Lovett, Barton Kilgore, Roman Guy, Laverne Sosa, Godiva Stanley and the monosyllabic Butts.