Parricide

See Homicide.

The offence of ki Uing one's father; also, a person guilty of killing his father. This word has, in the civil and French law, the force of a technical name of a receives an aggravated punishment. And the offence includes mother-killing; also, as we understand, the killing a brother or sister, or one's children. As these homicides are not distinguished in punishment where the common law prevails, the word is there not technical: it merely imports the general recognition which the community may entertain of the graver enormity of this class of homicides. It may have the broader meaning; but, as generally used, it imports the killing a father; while matricide is used for killing a mother, fratricide for killing a brother, sororicide for killing a sister, and others might be mentioned. Each of these may denote either the ofience or the offender. Wharton gives two other words of this group: parenticide, "one who murders a parent," and paricide, "a word to be distinguished iroia patricide, or parricide (the second r in which is simply a softened (), in that the one is a murderer generally, the other a murderer of his father; the derivation evidently being in one case from parem, an equal, and ccedo, to kill, that is, the murder of a fellow-citizen, of one not a slave; but in the other, from patrem, a father, and ccedo." But we have never met either of these in actual use. By the Roman law, parricide, or the murder of one's parents or children, was punished in a much severer manner than any other kind of homicide. After being scourged, the delinquents were sewed up in a leather sack, with a live dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and so cast into the sea. Jacob, In addition to the punishment of death, for parricides, the Scotch law (act 1594, ch. 220) ordains that he who has slain " his father or mother, gudschir or gudedame " shall suffer a total corruption of blood, in tinea recta, and be " discherished in all time thereafter, for their lahds, heritages, tacks, possessions," whidi are to devolve on the next collateral relation, in the same manner as if the direct line had failed. Bell.