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- For other uses of the word "murder," see Murder (disambiguation).
Template:CrimLaw In law, murder is the crime of a human being causing the death of another human being, without lawful excuse, and with intent to kill or with an intent to cause grievous bodily harm. In most countries it is considered the most serious crime, and invokes the highest punishment available under the law.
Murder is both a legal and a moral term, that are not always coincident. A killing may not be legally classified as murder, but still morally considered by some as a murder. For example, critics claim that the death penalty morally counts as a murder.
 Murder and other illegal killings
In most countries, if one person kills another person illegally, the killer might be charged with murder, or with some lesser offense, depending upon the circumstances:
- Unintentionally caused deaths due to recklessness or negligence are treated in most countries as the lesser crime of involuntary manslaughter or criminally negligent homicide
- Intentional killings without premeditation are sometimes charged as voluntary manslaughter rather than murder.
- In many common law jurisdictions, a killer is not guilty of murder if the victim lives longer than a year and a day after the attack.
- In some jurisdictions, killings under extreme provocation or duress are legally excused as justifiable homicide; see crime of passion
- In the US, there are key differences between Homicide and Murder. Homicide is death caused by another person, such as through self-defense, or accidentally. Murder is death caused by another person through illegal means. All murders are homicides, but not all homicides are murders.
 Legal, non-murder killings
Some cases of premeditated, intentional killing have lawful excuse and thus are not legally murder, or even crimes at all. In most countries this includes:
- Killing a person who posesses an immediate threat to the lives of oneself or others, i.e. in self-defense (excluding the United Kingdom)
- Killing a non-surrendered enemy combatant in time of war
- Executing a person in accordance with a legally imposed sentence of death
 Mitigating circumstances
Most countries allow conditions that "affect the balance of the mind" to be regarded as mitigating circumstances against murder. This means that a person may be found guilty of "manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility" rather than murder, if it can be proved that the killer was suffering from a condition that affected their judgement at the time. Depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and medication side-effects are examples of conditions that may be taken into account when assessing responsibility.
A somewhat different defense is insanity, which is almost exclusively used in cases of psychosis such as that caused by schizophrenia. In some jurisdictions, the verdict "not guilty by reason of insanity" is used in these cases, leading to the odd circumstance that a victim was murdered, but the killer is technically not a murderer under the law. Some countries, such as Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom and Australia, allow post-partum depression, or 'baby-blues', as a defense against murder of a child by a mother, provided that a child is less than a year old. Killers who have successfully argued the insanity defense are usually assigned mandatory clinical treatment for many years, rather than prison.
 Country-specific murder law
 United Kingdom
About 850 murders per year (reported in 2000) are committed in the United Kingdom. This is low compared to the United States with 12,000. These are only raw numbers which do not take varying populations into account: a better perspective can be gained by comparing murders per year per hundred thousand population (1 in the UK, 4 in the USA, and 63 in Colombia - source).
In English law, homicide can be divided into several offences, including:
- Murder - Killing of another person whilst having either the intention to kill (with "malice aforethought") or to cause grievous bodily harm.
- Manslaughter - Unintentional and