CHAPTER V
ASSAULTS, HOMICIDE, AND WOUNDS
Assault.—Every act of attack upon the person of another is an assault in law, whether it injure or not; nor is it necessary that the act done take effect. Spitting on anyone is an assault. No provocation by word, whether written or spoken, can justify an assault, though it may mitigate the offence. If a medical man unnecessarily strip a female patient naked, under pretence that he cannot otherwise judge of her illness, it is an assault if he himself take off her clothes (R. v. Rosinski, 1 Mood C.C. 12). So, where a medical man had connection with a girl fourteen years of age, under the pretence that he was thereby treating her medically for the complaint for which he was attending her, she making no resistance solely from the bona fide belief that such was the case, this was held to be certainly an assault, and probably a rape (R. v. Case, 1 Den. 580; 19 L.J. [M.C.] 174). Such an act is now held to constitute a rape.
Battery.—This includes beating or wounding. A touch of the finger, however slight, is included under this term.
Homicide.—In Scotch law homicide is held to be committed only where a distinctly self-existent human life has been destroyed. Destruction of an unborn child, however short a time before delivery, may be criminal, but is not homicidal. In the same country criminal homicide is divided into two classes:
(1) Murder. (2) Culpable Homicide.
1. Murder is constituted in law by any wilful act causing the destruction of human life, whether plainly intended to kill, or displaying such utter and wicked recklessness as to imply a disposition depraved enough to be wholly regardless of the consequences. Murder may be the result of personal violence, poison, or by the committal of some other serious crime, as where anyone causes the death of a woman in the attempt to procure criminal abortion, rape, or by the exposure of an infant which results in its death. The use of weapons is not essential.
2. Culpable Homicide.—The name applied in law to cases where the death of a person is caused or materially accelerated by improper conduct of another, and where the guilt does not come up to the crime of murder:
(a) Intentional killing of another in circumstances implying neither murder on the one hand, nor justifiable homicide on the other—e.g. if a person exceed moderation in retaliation for an injury, or kill another when the danger to which he was exposed is passed.
Every charge of murder is held to conclude a charge of culpable homicide, and the jury, if they see cause, may find that culpable homicide only has been committed.
(b) Homicide, by the doing of any unlawful, or any rash and careless act, from which death results, though not foreseen as probable—e.g. using firearms in a public street, &c.