Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Homicide

According to the Police there were 98 homicides last year.

According to Statistics New Zealand, (I)n New Zealand 'homicide' includes murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, infanticide, abortion, and aiding suicide/pact. Within this, 'murder' includes conspiracy to murder, and incite/counsel/attempt to procure murder.

They can't both be right. Any input?
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Abortion = Homicide?

Interesting, there were over 17000 of those last year performed in NZ. I could look up the exact figure.

If we count them as homicides then Baghdad looks positively peaceful in comparison.

4:21 PM
Lindsay Mitchell said...

The abortion stats are in the Demographic Trends 2006 Statistics NZ if anyone is interested. Yes, that rather intrigued me.

5:10 PM
Anonymous said...

In fact the exact number is 17,531.

Which led to this post

Abortion the leading cause of premature death in New Zealand

5:33 PM
Nigel Kearney said...

According to the Crimes Act, homicide is the killing of a human being by another, directly or indirectly, by any means whatsoever.

Culpable homicide is either murder or manslaughter but homicide need not be culpable.

A child becomes a 'human being' when it has completely proceeded in a living state from the body of its mother.

So abortions are not included and neither are unsuccessful attempts. The existence of conspiracy or incitement doesn't change whether a homicide occurred, only the number of people responsible.

Murder, manslaughter and infanticide are included. Accidents not amounting to manslaughter would also satisfy the above definition but I'm not sure how police record them.

9:12 AM

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