Muhdah!

Everybody loves a good one: old ladies, vicars, poets, aristocrats, hard-bitten old soak boozers, opera-loving intellectuals, doctors, lawyers and everybody else on the sofa: murder is not dead but alive and kicking.

From the grim, narrow-eyed, wind-blown stale whisky snow off the mean streets look, getting up from the corpse to say 'It's muhdah!' in Glasgow, to nice middle-England's 'She's dead, sir,' to the Toff saying 'Run along for the police, now there's a good fellow,' and the old lady saying 'Oh that poor girl!' we are all corpse crazy. We love bloodstains, times of death, how-long-in-the-water and 'Where were you between the hours of 11 and five?' We love false alibis, skeletons in closets, secret love children, buried treasure and long-standing grudges.

Of course in the real world most murders aren't like that at all. Our police forces are not doing the decent thing by being baffled such that they have to call on some passing lord, old lady or Belgian gourmand; rather they have probably got the suspect and they have probably already found the weapon where it was chucked behind the hedge and they have all the bloodstained clothing they need. The real murders are prosaic: they are knife fights and glassings, kicks to the head and pre-meditated shootings. Some involve children and babies. Often there is a psychiatric or psychological element. 'Whodunnit?' is more often 'Whydunnit?'

So, very rarely are our detectives suddenly smacking their foreheads and saying 'Of course! How could I have been so stupid!' before leaping into their cars and catching in the nick of time the villains loading the bullion/masterpiece/suitcase into the Bugatti heading off for St Tropez and no extradition treaty. As I say, most of the time the suspect is already in the cells in a white paper suit waiting to be interviewed.

Higher definition

Most murders are accidents that have taken a tragic turn. Most murders are not really about an intention to kill but an intention to cause really serious harm. The genuinely evil are probably ill; many murderers did not necessarily want their victims actually dead. Many wish that they could follow the victim and end it all themselves.

So it is timely for us to look at categorising murder, as the Director of Public Prosecutions has suggested. Some murders really are a question of millimetres in a fraction of a second; some are cold, deliberate and brutal. Some are committed in moments of intense anguish, in a split second where if the phone had rung or somebody had come to the door, if something heavy had not been immediately to hand or they had just got a bit more sleep or had a bit less to drink or had just slowed down a little bit '“ would never have happened.

It would be helpful for the law to be more specific. The law is sensitive in terms of picking up homicides '“ it is clear and good at identifying when homicide arises, but not as to the scale of it. 'One size fits all' is not good enough '“ particularly as 'one size fits all' is no longer good enough in the area of assault and sexual offences, drug cases and burglaries. We have more carefully defined a great deal, so now is a good time to better define murder. There must be a difference between a planned, cold-blooded execution type murder in a gang-land killing, revenge attack or the like, and that of the wife driven to distraction or even the drunken fight where one blow kills and two lives are ended.

Less pain, more gain

We may also find that there are more guilty pleas. It could be that a more careful approach to pleading would be installed, particularly with credit for a guilty plea, where the sentence is allowed to be less than life with the unpredictable nature of the tariff in terms of a minimum sentence. There would also perhaps be an easier role for the Parole Board and the prisons in terms of rehabilitation. It may even be less painful for the relatives and friends of the deceased to have a resolution based on what really happened, and the responsibility for what happened clearly set out, rather than the rollercoaster and blame-shifting of a trial.

Still, one loser is going to be the television and fiction homicide industry. Somehow it just will not be the same. I know that everybody always confesses in the end on television just in time for the news and the adverts and bedtime '“ but when the detective looks up from the body and says 'Muhdah!' it will be a shame if he or she has to say 'It looks like second degree homicide with several aggravating features but one or two mitigating features.' Not quite as snappy as the old days. In the same way, in the confession scene, instead of saying 'Yes of course I killed him you fools and I'm glad I did! You don't know how I have laughed watching you all running about chasing the wrong clues' etc, now the murderer will have to say 'Yes I did kill the victim but not in any sense in the first degree but third as I think you will find if I just get out this list and the psychological report on me that I have already had prepared.'

That's the trouble with the law '“ no fun really. Still, that's progress for you.