(N. D. M.)
[1] In 1901 it was provided that the ten years should date from the segregation of the lands from the public domain.
HOMEYER, KARL GUSTAV (1795-1874), German jurist, was born on the 13th of August 1795 at Wolgast in Pomerania. After studying law at the universities of Berlin, Göttingen and Heidelberg (1813-1817), he settled as a Privatdocent, in 1821, at the university of Berlin, where he became ordinary professor of law in 1827. His principal works are his edition of the Sachsenspiegel (in 3 vols., 1827, 3rd ed., 1861, containing also some other important sources of Saxon or Low German law), which is still unsurpassed in accuracy and sagacity of research, and his book on Die Haus- und Hofmarken (1870), in which he has given a history of the use of trade-marks among all the Teutonic nations of Europe, and which is full of important elucidations of the history of law and also contains valuable contributions to the history of art and civilization. In 1850 Homeyer was elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, in the Transactions of which he published various papers exhibiting profound learning (Über die Heimat, 1852; Genealogie der Handschriften des Sachsenspiegels, 1859; Die Stadtbücher des Mittelalters, 1860; Der Dreissigste, 1864, &c.). He died on the 20th of October 1874.
HOMICIDE (Lat. homicidium), the general and neutral term for the killing of one human being by another. The nature of the responsibility of the slayer to the state and to the relatives of the slain has been one of the chief concerns of all systems of law from the earliest times, and it has been variously considered from the points of view of the sanctity of human life, the interests of the sovereign, the injury to the family of the slain and the moral guilt, i.e. the motives and intentions, of the slayer.
The earliest recorded laws (those of Khammurabi) do not contain any sweeping general provision as to the punishment of homicide. The death penalty is freely imposed but not for homicide. “If a man strike a gentleman’s daughter that she dies, his own daughter is to be put to death, if a poor man’s the slayer pays ½ mina.” In the Mosaic law the general command “Thou shalt not kill” of the Decalogue is in terms absolute. In primitive law homicide, however innocent, subjected the slayer to the lawful vengeance of the kindred of the slain, unless he could make some composition with him. This lex talionis (a life for a life) resulted: (1) in a course of private justice which still survives in the vendetta of Corsica and Albania, and the blood feuds arising out of “difficulties” in the southern and western parts of the United States; (2) in the recognition of sanctuaries and cities of refuge within which the avenger of blood might not penetrate to kill an innocent manslayer; and (3) in the system of wite, bote and wer, by which the life of every man had its assessed price payable to his chief and his next of kin.
It took long to induce the relatives of the slain to appreciate anything beyond the fact of the death of their kinsman or to discriminate between intentional and accidental homicide. By the laws of Khammurabi (206, 208) striking a man in a quarrel without deadly intent but with fatal effect was treated as a matter for compensation according to the rank of the slain. The Pentateuch discriminates between the man “who lieth in wait for” or “cometh presumptuously” on “his neighbour to slay him with guile” (Exodus xxi. 13, 14), and the man “who killeth his neighbour ignorantly whom he hated not in time past” (Deut. xix. 4). But even killing by misadventure exposed the slayer to the avenger of blood. “As a man goeth into the wood with his neighbour to hew wood, and his hand fetcheth a stroke with the axe to cut down a tree and the head slippeth from the helve and lighteth upon his neighbour that he die: he shall flee into one of these cities (of refuge) and live” (Deut. xix. 5).
Under the early laws of Teutonic and Celtic communities the inconveniences of the blood feud were gradually mitigated (see [Criminal Law]) by the system of wite and wer (or eric), but the blood feud continued long in Friesland and Lower Saxony, and in parts of Switzerland until the 16th century. In England under the Norman system homicide became a plea of the crown, and the rights of the kindred to private vengeance and to compensation were gradually superseded in favour of the right of the king to forfeitures where the homicide amounted to a crime (felony).